Something To Live For

By Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi

Something To Live For recounts the drama that is unleashed when the lives of three college students and a fledgling gangster cross paths in New York and Paris. Solomon the photographer, Utica the intellectual, and Demo the criminal fall in love with Jesse. She becomes pregnant and refuses to reveal which of her three lovers is the father. In a setting of obsessive love, urban alienation, and surreal mayhem the backgrounds and psyches of the four come into play, and inexorably lead to ruin and redemption.

Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi has written an unforgettable psychological thriller about young intellectuals seeking meaning in their lives during the tempestuous sixties and seventies. 

Ruth Rosen, historian and author.

 

Mahdavi’s remarkable observational skills, enthralling storytelling, and eye for detail illuminate his hard-hitting writing giving us an enduring story of resilience and love.

Jonathan Shimony, painter and sculptor.

 

Design: Peter Macken Dialogo Design

Cover photo: Rafael Sinclaifr Mahdavi

 

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: May 1, 2018

Book preview

SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR

Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi

Printed by CreateSpace, An Amazon.com Company

Copyright © Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi 2017

ISBN 13: 978-1976408854

ISBN 10: 1976408857

Also by Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi

Staying Alive, poems and photographs, 2007

Villa Dolores, a memoir, 2017

This book is a work of fiction.

For my friends, alive and dead.

Contents

Part 1: Paris 1967

Part 2: Paris 1973

Part 3: New York 1966

Part 4: Paris 1973

Part 5: New York 1966

Part 6: New York 1973

Part 7: Paris 1973

About the author

Note

Give me something to live for.

Graffiti at New York University 1966.

PART 1

PARIS 1967

Chapter 1

The police didn’t stop them leaving the country. The forged passports were very good.

There were moments during the flight when it seemed unbearable to Solomon and he couldn't move enough to work the cramps out of his arms and legs. Rose slept fitfully. Her ears had hurt her when the plane took off. She cried in fits and starts. Solomon held her in his arms during the entire flight, even when she slept and even when he went to the galley at the back of the plane to ask the stewardesses to warm up the baby bottle.

Jesse was Rose's mother and Jesse was the eye of the vortex.

Who was the father? That remained a mystery sort of, for there were only three possible answers.

There was little light in the sky when the Air France plane landed. Compared to JFK, Orly airport looked small and pale, shrouded as it was in early morning fog. With Rose asleep in her snuggly on his chest and his carry-on bag in hand, Solomon descended the stairs from the plane and along with the other passengers got on a waiting bus. He heard the automatic doors hissing as they closed. It took the bus less than five minutes to reach the terminal building.

The passengers were directed up a ramp. They arrived at a long corridor at the end of which Solomon could see two glass cubicles occupied by immigration officials. The queue moved along slowly. The police des fontières looked first at Solomon and Rose, then at their American passports, and finally stamped the documents. At baggage control Rose started to cry. The douaniers waved Solomon, Rose, and the duffel bag through to the exit.

Only when he was outside the terminal did Solomon dare murmur to himself that they had made it. He and Rose had pulled off their disappearing act from New York. He patted Rose gently on her back.

He changed $500 into French francs and bought a ticket for the bus into Paris. He’d be less noticeable that way. A taxi driver might remember him and Rose more easily. The morning mist had burned off, the sun was out, and from the bus Solomon got his first look at the countryside of Île de France. The green fields receded into the distance, dotted here and there with farmhouses. The morning light angled in sharply everywhere and the details of the rolling land had stark shadows attached to them. The clear, pure intensity of the landscape reminded Solomon of some religious paintings he and Jesse had looked at in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The cars Solomon saw on the road were smaller than those in the United States. A gray Citroën deux-chevaux went by and banal as it was confirmed to Solomon that he was really in France.

Rose was silent, her eyes wide open, darting back and forth between the cushioned interior of the bus and the landscape whizzing by outside. Solomon cocked his head this way and that, listening to snippets of passengers’ conversations. To his surprise he remembered much from his high school French classes in Brooklyn. Twenty minutes later the bus left the périphérique and entered the city of Paris from the south, at the Porte d'Orléans. At the Boulevard Montparnasse the bus turned left and within ten minutes was entering the Gare Routière des Invalides, the Paris bus terminal. With Rose safely strapped in the snuggly, Solomon stepped off the bus and collected his luggage from the steel hold of the vehicle.

He stood on the sidewalk with his bags at his feet and fully understood the daunting task awaiting him. He was going to start a new life in Paris with Rose. He was no longer Solomon and if he wanted to stay out of prison he’d better get used to it. Solomon was now another person in another city in another country, but that was all right. He couldn't go back and that was all right too. Those were the facts. That was the past. What was he to do? Get philosophical about it? That was something Utica was wont to do. He would talk this moment to death, pick at the scab of the memories of the last nine months in Manhattan.

Paris looked beautiful but gray.

Solomon and Rose stayed at the Hotel Stella near the

Théâtre de l’Odéon in the Latin Quarter. He could have afforded a better hotel, but he didn’t want to arouse any suspicion by staying in a fancy place. And he wasn’t sure about his future income. The hotel guests were mostly youngsters Solomon's age on their way to Katmandu or some similar place in the Far East. Most of them were American, kind of heart and kind to Rose. Solomon got to know some of them quite well and a few times he asked one of the older women among them to baby sit Rose for an hour or so while he went on an errand.

And making a phone call about apartment rentals was more than an errand; it was a hassle. Paris telephones were a rarity and public phones were in the basement of brasseries or cafes, next to the stinking Turkish toilets that––as he would learn later––Americans in Paris referred to as squat- jobs. Need to make a phone call? No that easy, pal.  Before buying your phone token or jeton you had to buy something at the bar first, something you most probably did not want to drink or eat, just to be allowed to make a phone call or pee. That’s what the cute sign on the bar said: L'Utilisation du téléphone et des toilettes est strictement réservée au consommateurs. Merci de votre compréhension. Solomon loved that last bit. Thank you for your understanding. Only in French did it sound all right. In any other language it was a kick in the bladder of anybody with an urge to pee. No wonder French had been the language of diplomacy for so many years. Even insults sounded okay. And then while you made your phone call in the basement somebody would invariably flush the adjacent toilet and the fetid water seeped out under the cubicle door and soiled your shoes. Nearly every endeavor Solomon undertook in the City of Light, no matter how small or banal, was fraught with idiotic, petty difficulties.

But Solomon loved the Paris metro from the beginning. And he got to know it well as he crisscrossed Paris looking for an apartment to rent. The metro system was easier to understand than the New York subway. What struck Solomon every time he descended into the metro was the ambient smell. The indescribable odor was omnipresent, snuggled in and at home in the underground stations. Every stone arch and steel girder, it seemed, had retained the stench and patina of the city's history, feasts, and massacres. The smell was indifferent to human plight, it wafted with supreme mugginess over the young and old, the tired and the frisky, the rich and the destitute. Solomon imagined an invisible octopus spreading its long, odiferous tentacles from the central Chatelet station through the entire system of Parisian tunnels, to the Porte de Clignancourt in the North and the Porte d'Orléans in the South, to the Chateau de Vincennnes in the East and the Pont de Neuilly in the West. The smell hung in the air in all the stations, including the Gare du Nord, which for Solomon retained a certain fascination because it was there that he first saw a poster for the French Foreign Legion. He had mused to himself that he could flee and enlist in the légion where no questions were asked about a volunteer's past––but what about Rose?

When going over the ads for apartments to rent Solomon noticed right away that they were listed in various categories, those that had indoor toilets, those that had a phone, and those that had neither or both. A few listings proudly stated that the apartment in question would get a phone within a year. That usually meant the landlord had a lover, a relative, or a friend—a piston––high up in the bureaucratic hierarchy at the Ministère des Télécommunications to speed up the installation of a telephone line.

Solomon rented a two-room unfurnished apartment on the second floor in a building on the Rue Boulanger, a curving street behind the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin, near the metro Strasbourg-Saint Denis. It was not a chic area and that suited Solomon. One of the first things he put on the wall was the Guernica poster Jesse had given him. She had bought it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the center of the poster Jesse had painted a heart symbol in shiny, red nail polish. Rose slept in a crib next to Solomon’s mattress on the floor.

There was a phone in the apartment but no toilet. The toilette à la turque was down the hall so whenever Solomon had to relieve himself he first put Rose in her crib and then made sure he took three items with him––the key to his apartment, the key to the toilet cubicle, and toilet paper. If in a hurry he forgot one of these items he was in trouble. It wasn't worth going through all the rigmarole for a simple pee, so more often than not he peed in the sink.

As to the shower in the apartment––for that there was a contraption that folded down from the kitchen sink, with attached tubes running from the sink faucets to the hand held shower nozzle. The hot water was generated by a gizmo over the sink that made a little explosion as the gas ignited when he turned on the hot water. And there was also a small electric motor to pump out the dirty water back up into the sink drain. The set-up looked like something Jules Verne might have thought up, but Solomon later learned that such showers were common in Paris.

It seemed perfectly sensible to Solomon that the French had a thriving perfume industry. Put on lots of perfume to hide the stench of unwashed bodies. Some days riding the metro was a powerful olfactory experience, the spectrum of human odors was at times debilitating.

One day, a week after his move into the apartment, Solomon was descending the stairs one morning when he came upon a little girl sitting on the last step by the concierge’s door. The girl was crying and rubbing her knee. He sat down beside her and asked where her mother was. But the girl stopped crying the moment she saw Rose asleep on Solomon’s chest. At that moment the concierge, carrying a baguette, entered from the street. The woman took the girl into her arms, greeted Solomon, and asked who he was. He noticed that she spoke French with an accent. He explained that he had just moved into the apartment on the second floor and introduced himself and Rose. The concierge’s name was Esperanza and she hailed from Barcelona. Her daughter’s name was Amapola.

The following day Solomon stopped by the concierge’s loge with a coloring book and some crayons for Amapola. Esperanza was touched by Solomon’s gesture and offered to baby sit Rose whenever necessary. Solomon welcomed the offer and so it was that Esperanza made life easier for Solomon during his first years in Paris.

A few weeks after he concluded this arrangement with the concierge Solomon phoned Xavier Cavalier—Cava to his friends––at the

Agence Gamma. Monsieur Cavalier was busy. Solomon informed Cava's secretary that a close friend of Monsieur Valier was in town and gave her a message. Solomon hung up before the secretary could ask any questions.

Solomon and Cava met at the cafe Le Mandarin on the corner of the Rue de Seine and the Boulevard Saint Germain, not far from the Rue Jacob where the Gamma offices were located. It was a hot summer morning in the last week of July. The terrace at Le Mandarin was filled with Parisians, who under the guise of having a late breakfast were preening themselves and sun bathing. Some women had pulled down their blouse and bra straps over their shoulders in order to get a better tan. Inside the cafe a few workers at the bar in their usual blue overalls sipped their petit blancs or Calvados and stared at the women on the terrace. Solomon and Cava exchanged small talk, but before Cava could ask any important questions Solomon swore him to secrecy.

Okay, so what's your new name? Cava asked.

"I'm not going to tell you. Only to you and a friend in New York was I ever Jean Valier or Solomon Ayre. As to my future payments we’ll set up something discreet. My old nom de camera will appear nowhere ever again. Jean Valier disappeared in New York. When I call from now on I'll say Gino, which is not my real new name, but you'll know me as Gino. Never call me Solomon again. It’s Gino, remember it."

I find that insulting, Cava said. You don’t trust me?

What if your phone is tapped?

Don't be ridiculous. Why would my phone be tapped?

Why not? Solomon asked, "I can think of a lot of reasons, pissed off insurance companies for one, they just do it, they don't ask for a court order. You know that, this country isn't a paragon of equal justice for all. If you have enough piston here you get a phone, you get a residence permit, you get a fucking wiretap. A friend of mine in New York once told me to always assume the worst if you've broken the law just a teensy weensy bit and if you haven't, then assume zero. It's good advice. Keeps the mind on edge."

I still think––

What if I had said I was Jean Valier when I called you to set up this meeting? Solomon asked, interrupting Cava. "Even using Jean Valier as a cover at the start of our collaboration in New York wasn't smart. And saying I was a friend of Valier’s when I called Gamma now was risky, but I knew it would get you out of your office. The police or even Interpol and insurance bounty hunters too, they now follow you to meet Valier's friend because they remember the name Valier appeared on some shocking photos in New York last year. Some folks may think it’s worth keeping an eye on Gamma, maybe there’s a connection between Gamma and Valier and the bank heist. Valier was an innocent bystander? Or was he in on it? You lead the cops to me here and now and voilà. You can imagine the rest. I’m done for. I'm being realistic, which is a polite way of saying I'm fucking paranoid. I got that from my friend in New York too."

What if I have to get a hold of you? Cava asked.

Call me here. Solomon gave Cava a slip of paper with a number. In fact the number was a phone in a small camera repair shop in an alley near Les Halles. An American draft dodger whom Solomon had befriended and now paid regularly ran the place.

What is this? Cava asked.

There you can leave a message for Gino. I never call from there. I never go there. And if you find the place and anybody, and that includes you, goes there in person you’ll be informed there’s no Gino.

Oh yeah?

Cava, it's safer this way. I'm sure you’ll understand. You get in touch with me for work. My friend in New York is the only person, apart from you, who knows I am in Paris. If that person gets in touch, you call this number and leave a message.

Okay. Your friend in New York, what’s his name? Or her name?

It’s a he. Tatti. Remember it.

I already have, Cava said.

Now, take a look at these. From his inside pocket Solomon extracted the contact sheets and the negatives of the second bank robbery. Cava took out a magnifying glass and looked at the contact sheets.

These are incredible!

Thanks, Cava. Take these photographs and sell them. I need money.

Sure. They’re great photos.

We both believe in luck. It takes two to tango. We're helping each other. One more thing and I’m dead serious about this. Don’t go blabbing to anybody about me and that means nobody, not even Bo when you see her in New York.

I'm not seeing her anymore, Cava said.

Oh, really? What happened?

She’s seeing this other guy, some hot shot lawyer, I think.

A lawyer? Ever see the fellow?

No. I never had the honor. Don't even know his name.

I'm sorry about you and Bo.

Who knows? Cava said. I was so crazy about her. Still am really. And don't worry, I won't say a thing. You are a great photographer. For me you're a hero or you will be one day when your pictures are published with your name on them.

Not for now. Keep my name off, Solomon said.

Yes, sure. You know I wouldn’t say or do anything to harm you.

What are you going to do about Bo?

Ah, that is none of your business, Cava said. I have my secrets, you have yours, Gino.

Cava paid the bill and both men stood up to leave.

Chapter 2

Solomon stayed on in Paris.

He never lacked for work. He went abroad some times on photo assignments. When he was away he made sure to call Esperanza and Rose every day. He never let himself forget that Jesse’s father would go to great lengths to track down Rose and take her back to the U.S. Solomon stayed in Paris as much as possible. Although he trusted Esperanza he worried about his daughter when he was away.

He had expected some news from Tatti after the second month in Paris, but none came.

Solomon struggled with the Gallic language. The French he had learned in high school had quickly come back to him. He discovered that nobody in France or anywhere else for that matter spoke French without making mistakes. Grammatically it was a difficult and rigid language. Everybody made mistakes, including the president of the country. What other Latin based language, Solomon asked himself, was so persnickety about rules that some past participles had three e's in a row? Granted, two of them had an accent aigu, but still. And yet most grammatical rules were riddled with exceptions.

He was appalled at the rudeness of Parisians in general and of waiters in particular. He could sit in a bistro and wait until the cows came home before the waiter deigned to notice him. When the waiter at last did sidle up and realized that Solomon didn’t speak French fluently the waiter often just walked away. Once Solomon began to master the Gallic tongue he did what most Parisians did, namely be extremely rude and get quick service, everywhere, be it at the corner brasserie or at the post office where the rudeness of the employees was legendary.

Cava occasionally took Solomon along to dinner parties and some times Solomon took Rose along. He soon discovered that Parisians did not particularly like babies, especially those, who were not toilet trained. Propre was the French word used for toilet trained. Propre meant clean. Parisians preferred clean babies. Babies who were not toilet trained were dirty. Small children in general were not welcome at dinner parties. And the same attitude prevailed in restaurants where there were never any high chairs for kids. Parisian eateries preferred to welcome dogs rather than very young human beings. Dogs, particularly purebred ones, were a status symbol. Children were a nuisance.

And Solomon grew tired of the food mania. Food was an ongoing, national obsession. Whenever he was invited to somebody's house for a meal the talk invariably turned to the food and where the hostess had bought it and how she had prepared it, and oh yes, she had gone clear across town to buy the bread at that special boulangerie, you know, the one by the Gare du Nord where they also made the best éclairs and Paris-Brests and as far as the fish went, well, for that you had to go the fishmonger on the Rue Marbeuf, that was really the only place in town to buy fish if you really cared about what you ate, we're not Americans after all, just look at those amerloques, they're all so fat and that's because they eat so badly and as for our mussels here, now that was something else altogether, the place to buy mussels was at the Place Clichy, but the problem with going there was that there were so many whores in the neighborhood.

And so it went. When it came to the wine it was always the same tra-la-la. Ah, the wine, merciful God in heaven help me, Solomon thought, as the guests talked about the bouquet, the robe, the