We'll Always Have Paris (3 page)

I am going to be a classroom assistant in a secondary school on my year off and the school to which I have been assigned is in Canteleu, on the outskirts of Rouen in Normandy. Joe, who likes a
task, researches Canteleu, cycling down to the library, returning with several reference volumes plus the collected works of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert, both of whom have Normandy connections.
Flaubert’s house is actually on the outskirts of Canteleu it transpires, and has an illustrious literary past, having welcomed Zola, Turgenev and George Sand among others. Canteleu was a
pretty, bucolic Normandy hamlet back then, a short carriage trip from Rouen. Emile Zola, attending Flaubert’s funeral, describes it as ‘
un coin touffu de la grasse Normandie qui
verdoie dans une nappe de soleil
’, a densely planted corner of fertile Normandy, blossoming under a carpet of sun. Modern Canteleu is a whole other story, as I will soon discover.

I arrive in Rouen by train on a Sunday afternoon in January after a two-day induction course during which I learn nothing, except that red wine is fantastically, improbably cheap in Paris and
that no one here cares if I am old enough to drink it. It’s sort of terrifying the way we are all just left to our own devices to find our way to our schools, but I manage to acquire a ticket
and find a train (no one else is heading in my direction, since most of the other
assistantes
are based down south). Sitting by the window, I watch as the Paris
banlieues
give way
to orchards and farmland, and I track the wide meandering willow-lined course of the Seine. As we near Rouen, the fields give way again to several miles of flat industrial wasteland, illuminated in
the gathering darkness. When I alight, uneasily, at the station the English teacher, Madame Martine, is waiting for me, as arranged. She is a wispy woman in her fifties in a brown roll-neck, with
an air of resignation and little to say, but she does take me to the station café where, still English despite myself, I order tea and boggle in silent horror at what arrives: a tiny metal
pot of lukewarm water, a Lipton Yellow teabag on the side, no milk. Some of the children, she says, can be difficult, she uses the word ‘
insolent
’, but it will be fine.
Probably. I think back to my brief conversation with my predecessor, who told me he was held up in the car park of the nearby supermarket by one of his students, who stole a bottle of vodka from
him. I had assumed he was joking, but now I am less sure.

After I have finished my awful beverage, she drives me to my new home. We start to climb the hill to Canteleu – the wide, winding road fringed by meadows and wheatfields and poplars that
Zola described barely recognizable – when Madame Martine’s decrepit Renault is suddenly overtaken by ten vans full of CRS (the French riot police), sirens blaring,
pin pon pin pon
pin pon.
She shakes her head sorrowfully.

‘More trouble.’

With the sirens still audible and flashing lights reflecting off the apartment blocks, Madame Martine is unwilling to leave her car unattended (‘
Voyous
,’ she mutters,
‘vandals,
brigands
’). She drops me and my luggage at the front gate, gives me the key to my apartment (which is apparently within the school grounds) and drives away, promising
we will catch up on Monday. The
collège
is a modern low-rise, a squat heap of grey and white metal in the middle of a
cité
of pebble-dashed tower blocks.

My room is on the first floor of the administrative block. It is small, with a single bed and a small table and two hard metal chairs. The walls are made of metal too and are in fact the outside
walls of the building: I am living in a metal box, an ‘
établissement Pailleron
’ (so-named after the Paris school that famously burnt to the ground in twenty minutes in
the 1970s, which is reassuring). A second, interestingly configured small room combines fridge, hotplate, lavatory and shower in two square metres of space that would give the UK Health and Safety
Inspectorate enduring nightmares. As I settle in, putting posters on the walls and unpacking, a ballet of handbrake turns and sirens unfolds outside my window. When I venture to the phone box to
tell my parents all is well, a small crowd of teenagers gathers outside, calling out ‘Hello!’, ‘Fuck you!’, ‘Pussy!’ but not with any menace. They seem bored,
mainly, and hungry for distraction.

The area around the school is a sink estate; a large immigrant population living in poorly maintained social housing in an area of 30 per cent unemployment with few accessible shops or public
services. There is, quite simply, nothing to do, so it is no surprise that my students trail me to the launderette and the phone box, or that they spend each night stealing and joy-riding cars and
smoking weed, engaging in half-hearted clashes with the CRS riot police at weekends.

Teaching, it turns out, is not teaching at all, it’s babysitting. This is not the kind of environment where you can think big thoughts about the horizon-broadening, mind-expanding role of
education. Why bother with school, the older children regularly ask us (homework undone, third written warning sent home and ignored), when there are no jobs, when your name marks you out as
beur
, Arab, in a society where that means an instant black mark against you? They are funny and bright, mainly, but they have no sense they have a future and who am I to suggest otherwise,
coming from my white, prosperous city centre life?

School is not even a place of safety for these kids. The yard is lawless and frightening, humming with tension. There are drug deals and fights and on one occasion one of the older children
holds another kid’s arm against a burning hot radiator until he suffers second-degree burns. The police are on site most weeks for one reason or another and the staffroom has bars on the
windows. Ashen-faced, resigned-looking men and women huddle around the coffee machine, smoking and talking about their most recent bout of industrial action. The English teacher goes on long-term
sick leave shortly after I arrive, never to be seen again. The younger children, the ones I teach, fall into two groups. There are the swaggerers, who deal with the open and veiled threats they
face with bluster and violence, and then there are those who try to become invisible. I watch sometimes as the smaller, more diffident kids cross the yard, hampered by their vast school bags and I
will the big boys, the casually violent invincible
caïds
, not to notice them. I don’t really teach anyone anything and after a few weeks I refine my lessons to two: either I
hand out copies of
Smash Hits
and we chat about song lyrics (in French) or we play bingo.

This France is so very far from Laetitia Casta modelling Dolce & Gabbana swimwear in French
Elle
, or from Gérard Depardieu playing the viol in a powdered wig, I barely
recognize it and reading Maupassant short stories is no preparation for this Normandy. It feels bleak and hopeless: the tower blocks create vicious wind tunnels and it rains diligently for weeks, a
solid, turbo-charged drizzle that feels as if it will never stop. There isn’t even really anywhere I can buy decent patisserie in Canteleu; rather I live on radishes and Haagen Dazs ice cream
from the supermarket (which is worryingly, in view of my predecessor’s experiences, called ‘Atac’).

In these days before Mathieu Kassovitz’s vividly bleak slap in the face portrait of
cité
life,
La Haine
, explodes our preconceptions, I know almost nothing about
the
banlieue.
Most of what I know is gleaned from Bertrand Blier’s surreal, dream-like film
1, 2, 3 Soleil
, where the grimy, half-derelict Marseilles
cité
becomes strangely sublime, baking in the sun to a soundtrack of cicadas. There is deprivation and violence and sex, but also solidarity and magic and unexpected acts of kindness, like the old man
who ‘tames’ a child-burglar by leaving him small amounts of money and food. In Blier’s
banlieue
, anything can happen: people come back from the dead; adults become
children again. It’s quite a vision for Canteleu to live up to.

The remainder of my knowledge of the
banlieue
comes from Christine Rochefort’s
Les Petits Enfants du Siècle
, a 1960s ‘issues’ novel we studied for
A-level French. The action in
Les Petits Enfants du Siècle
takes place as the
cités
around Paris are under construction – their expansion is both backdrop and
plot point. Josyane, the teenage narrator, is a child of social housing, the oldest of a feckless, ever-expanding family living on welfare in a tower block and she falls for Guido, a builder
working on the construction of the surrounding towers (Guido is at least thirty and Josyane is twelve, it is not exactly a healthy relationship). When Guido leaves, she embarks upon a despairing
journey to find him, via sex with most of the
cité
(what was Monsieur Collins thinking?).

In one scene Josyane heads off to try and find Guido in the newly constructed suburb of Sarcelles, where his crew is rumoured to have been spotted, and is brought to a standstill by the vision
of the ideal, as yet unsullied structures: kilometres of white towers, lawns, shops and youth centres.

‘It was beautiful. Green, white, orderly. You could sense the organization. They had done everything to make us feel at home, they had asked themselves: what do we need to put in for them
to feel good? And they had put it.’

She gets lost amidst this architecture of optimism, wandering confused up and down identical streets named for poets: Rue Verlaine, Mallarmé, Paul-Claudel, Victor Hugo.

This part, at least, I recognize: Canteleu has similar, similarly named streets down which you can get lost. In the early weeks I walk in the rain along Allée Bovary and Boulevard Monet
and Rue Pissarro, exploring, trying to find my way to and from school or to the bank, bewildered by the ranks of identical tower blocks. It is not as if there is much to see, and after a few such
outings, I tend not to venture out alone except to Atac, which I can see from my room. My main refuge, other than my metal-sided bedroom, is the
surveillants
’ room. The
surveillants
are mainly students, working to fund their studies. They deal with fights in corridors and social dramas, supervise detentions and frisk the kids on the way into school. There
is usually a good vein of gallows humour bouncing around us as we troop off to the canteen at half past eleven: who has thrown what piece of furniture at whom, what new and exotic insults have been
dredged up in long-running feuds.

Surveillants
come and go but there is a hard core of four: Marie-Laure, Sophie, Laurent and Olivier and over the
navarin d’agneau
(I have abandoned six years of
vegetarianism overnight, when faced with the prospect of six months of baguette and/or boiled potato and have managed to eat everything except the tongue, a forest of unadorned grey organs jauntily
arranged in the giant steel serving trays) and the terrible coffee, obviously, inevitably I suppose, I evaluate the two men. Laurent is dreamy, fair and chaotic and Olivier is the opposite.
He’s quite short, dark-haired and he vibrates with a barely suppressed energy. In the mornings as I lean out of my window to smoke a Gauloise Blonde Légère (my latest
pretension), I watch him searching the kids at the front gate, instantly recognizable in a red, puffy down jacket. I am not particularly interested in him, but when he asks if I would like to come
on a trip into Rouen one Wednesday afternoon (school finishes at twelve on Wednesdays), I say yes. The prospect of an afternoon in Canteleu is dismal (it has rained solidly for two weeks at this
point) and if I take the bus into town, there are bound to be students on it, staring at my clothes and sniggering (I find the girls far more terrifying than the boys). I have also sized him up and
decided that while I do not think he is a violent psychopath, if he does turn out to be one, he is quite small and slight, so I have a fighting chance.

So off we go. I don’t think it’s a date, but if it were a date, it’s a pretty terrible one. We go to some outpost of regional administration to pick up a form, then we go to a
large hardware store so he can buy some wood, then we have a coffee in the Rue du Gros-Horloge, Rouen’s most tourist-infested medieval street and all the while Olivier is speaking to me in
the most execrable, unbearable English. He seems like a nice man as far as I can elicit, but frankly, it’s like talking to a halfwit. After fifteen minutes or so, with me supplying the words
that elude him, I just can’t stand it any more, and I say something to him in French.

‘Oh!’ he says, surprised. Then in French: ‘But you’re really good!’ And he laughs, because he is not the kind of man to get offended about that kind of thing.
He’s right: I am really good and I’m quite proud of it. I don’t know how, whether it’s years of singing or Madame Cockroft or Gérard Depardieu. Maybe it’s even
the semioticist, but French has become something I can just do, the sounds trip off my tongue and the ‘r’s roll neatly.

Olivier orders us more coffee in his beautiful and, yes, sexy French and everything is so much better. Everything is great, actually, and we talk all afternoon, then we go for a Mexican meal and
drink too much tequila. A few weeks later after several more successful dates, we kiss.

Before we even have sex, I stay over in his grimy little house, which is in a rather depressing, far-flung village and looks like something you might see on a local news report about a grisly,
sexually motivated sequestration and murder. We share his mattress, which is on the floor in a first-floor room with no furniture, a single bare bulb and faded, peeling wallpaper that features the
rock band Kiss. It seems legitimate to wonder whether I may be murdered, but instead, we fall asleep perfectly entwined like something from a fairy tale: arms and legs entangled, my head on his
shoulder. It shouldn’t be comfortable for more than five minutes but I wake in the morning and neither of us has moved an inch.