Rue Des Capucins

By Mohamad Rezar

Do you believe in fate?

That powerful but indefinable force that can shape your life and force it to move in a direction, not of your own choice?

If you do, please see how the life of this young man was unfolding, in the opposite direction of what he had planned for.

If you don't, and think that belief in fate is an old fashioned outlook unfit for our modern times, please see for yourself what had become of this aspiring poet, surviving by being a street photographer in Paris.

All that he wanted was to achieve his artistic dreams.

But life had another plan for him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 20, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595787036

Mohamad Rezar

Mohamad Rezar, born and raised in the United States of Cherokee descent brings you this Romance Novel. The letters in this Novel are real, because they are his letters to his Princess and ?SweetHEART!?. Names and places have been changed, while preserving the ?heart? and the ?core? of the letters.

Book preview

Rue

des Capucins

Ed A. Salama

iUniverse LLC

Bloomington

RUE DES CAPUCINS

Copyright © 2004, 2014 Ed A. Salama.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse LLC

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-0-5953-3914-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-0-5957-8703-6 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 01/29/2014

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

Voyageur,

Ou vas tu si loin?

N’est ce donc pas ici,

Le but de ton voyage . . .

Victor Hugo

I

I know that the world is full of those who believe in destiny, fate and what not, but I tell you right away that I am not one of them. I have always believed in the free will that humans have, and should have, vis-à-vis the great issues of life, which means being able to plan that life to its full extent according to whatever ideas or even whims they may entertain. That conviction had stayed with me since I had started hearing adults talking around the house. I guess I was what they called a precocious kid. Then I had grown to forget that frequent dinner-table talk totally, that is until yesterday.

Only yesterday when I overheard that noisy woman talking to her husband in a restaurant, using and repeating the word fate all the time and being unaware that her words were unleashing a heap of forgotten memories of long-gone days that had started to haunt me mercilessly. The poor husband must have been deaf, a retired diplomat, a philosopher or an accustomed victim of her ongoing lectures that had made him end up being a silent partner at the dinner table. I couldn’t hear a word coming from his mouth and thought that he may have expressed approval or disapproval by shaking his head in any intelligible manner or by offering her a grimace that would have made her stop. I concluded that he didn’t express his views at all and that the woman was going in circles around herself trying to make some sense of what had happened to them.

Something she had attributed to the hand of destiny.

And that was three months ago, more than ninety-three days by an honest count. I still hear her words drumming in my ears. When I listen to the news in the morning, when I catch a glimpse of the obituaries and recognize some familiar names, when a fleeting reminiscence of my past invades my present and I wish if time goes back and give me the opportunity to start allover again, the voice of that angry woman and the image of her silent husband over dinner, late one Friday night, would jump out of the blue to scream inside my ears; f-a-t-e in a loud and abrasive voice.

Damn it even if she is right, damn it. The mere idea that we have no real control over our lives is against every thing I believe in. Simply because it robs us of the most precious thing we have in life, the freedom of choice.

Again this morning, while shaving and listening to the news, her ugly voice unexpectedly had managed to penetrate my awareness and caused me a great deal of disgust. I ended up throwing the shaver away in anger and wondered if I should go back to the same restaurant on a Friday evening to catch her and her husband and give them a lecture of my own. I reckoned that this could be an adequate punishment for the discomfort her loud voice and twisted analysis had caused me. I thought that within five minutes I could sway her thinking irrevocably and show her how to think straight. The idea sounded wonderful so I returned to my studio and decided to put the last touches on the painting that has been waiting for almost a month to be finished.

Painters tend to live inside what they are painting. They walk around only with their tired bodies and the truth is that their minds, and maybe also their souls, get stuck in a different place, mainly where the root of their last painting reside. My last painting has been taking more time than I had calculated. It was, I should say; it is, the longest project I have been trying to accomplish simply because every time I set up my mind to finish it, something happens that takes my mind and energy away. Today, again, is such a day.

The canvas is supposed to be a separate piece of life, in the here and now and has nothing to do with any other, particularly unrelated, parts of my life. But I have been mentally engrossed in the avalanche of events that had swept my life as a teenager. My unresolved mystery is that I don’t know what is in this painting that keeps dragging me back to those years?

For over a week I have been sitting in my crowded studio trying my best at moving that boat forward but it keeps pushing me vehemently in the opposite direction; an unending tug of war that sees me losing by sinking in my memories and drifting and wavering and not being able to finish the painting.

This painting is the third part of a triptych based on three seascapes featuring a group of sailboats in the foreground, with one single boat leaving the harbor in the background. The copious details of the sky, the clouds and tiny fishermen, with little birds zooming in and around their nets made me think that the painting was almost finished. Only the faraway boat at the end of the canvas kept intriguing me day after day and I knew that I wanted to change something about it, it’s heading maybe? But I never figured out exactly what. So today, I thought of working all day and not leaving for lunch the way I have been doing lately, just to catch up with time lost.

The morning was so crisp and stimulating. I could see the sea from my window, past a group of rocks huddling together like a family of prehistoric monsters that had lost their features to the vagaries of time, salt water and wind. When I entered the studio, I took off my coat and in trying to hang it somewhere, I ended up knocking my father’s photo to the ground. Not a very good way to start the day, I thought, then looked intensely at the photo.

My father. I must have loved this man tremendously even though I was not aware of it. I mean, I am very aware of it now. But that is the present and not the past. I must have loved him tremendously also in the past, the faraway, irretrievable and lost past. This simple black and white photo, in my personal possession since my mother had died two years ago, doesn’t seem to be able to define my feelings neither now nor many years ago. I have been thinking of him a lot, maybe it is because of the ocean or the sailboats and he had loved both. My father took me a lot with him sailing and fishing before he was killed in a single engine plane he was flying in Northern Canada. When the sunken machine was retrieved from the lake, there were two bodies in the cockpit, the second being an unknown woman. Later, my mother found out that he was having a secret affair. Her bitterness was insurmountable. He was killed only once but she was being tormented every day for the rest of her life. I didn’t know this when I was young but I imagine that I have tasted the pains of knowledge now.

I looked again at the painting, determined to put the last touches where they belong, but the morning had evaporated into the noon and I kept thinking of my father; smiling with a perfect row of shining teeth showing the large fish he had caught that day. I was standing next to him gazing at the stupid fish and wondering why it didn’t run away to avoid being caught by my father and how could it go back to its own father in order to avoid such fate. Fate! Here I am using that fearsome word again. I mean such end. My father is so handsome and so manly and so vigorous, I am willing to pay any price in order to be able to have lunch with you today daddy. But I know damn well that I can’t. I am not having any lunch and I better focus on that lonesome boat.

Every one knows that all fishing boats function under the same wind and on the same water and under the same sky. But not all of them end the day with the same catch. That one lonely boat, leaving port when all others are returning, took me back, inexplicably, to that crooked little street, Rue des Capucins, where I had a small room during my first stop in Paris. At that time, I was what you may call an aspiring photographer. I was a photographer all right, and I made some money doing it. Actually I survived all on my own doing it. However, adding the word aspiring sort of packs a lot of the driving force behind my life at the time, which was pure aspiration mixed with some little inspiration. My father was in and out of the phenomenon known as the film milieu. I am not inclined to use the term movie business used mainly in the USA because he never cared about the business part of it. He was a poet turned cameraman who had assisted in several successful projects, often philosophized about the new universal language cinematography was creating, had a lot of poets, directors and actors as friends and had kept home a large library, about the film as an art, in several languages and that is how I was caught in the moving pictures’ under currents. For endless hours I used to keep looking at the various titles, poetry collections and books on film, with a passion unequaled in the lives of any of my young friends. I had memorized hundreds of poems and seen all his film collection. He had copies of short films at home that he would show to his guests after dinner. One such film was shot in 1956 in Morocco by a guy who used an ultra-sensitive film. I watched in stupefaction the flow of light and shadows being projected over the heads of our dinner gusts.

It is here, my dear friends, my father said that night, that you can witness the seed of the new film language, the poetry of images, a seed of a new wave, the wave of the future.

Probably no one was touched by the dramatic movements of my father’s hands more than me. I had already succumbed to the magic spell of the moving pictures and what they were capable of weaving out of thin air; The New Wave.

Actually I never understood what that meant exactly. The year I had left the new world, I had read a description of what that new wave meant. Francoise Giroud had published a book talking about the need of youth for change. Had she asked for my opinion, I would have told her Bravo!

The change was what this young man was after. At age 16, I was well informed about the French film since the fall of Paris in 1940. I knew about the resistance, the cine-clubs, Henry Langlois and the Cinematheque, growing unexpectedly during the war, where one could take courses in film history. I had reviewed with curiosity La Revue du Cinema and we had probably all the issues at home since I was born. I knew that there was a serious difference between American and French films. All the debate resulting from the cold war and the French leftists and the amazing number of publications coming out of Paris, L’Ecran Francais, Cahiers du Cinema, Gazette du Cinema and the cinephile culture permeating the left bank of the Seine.

In short, I had developed a feeling that I was out and far away from where the most important things in life were happening. Life was happening in Paris and not in the cold Canadian suburbs where snow covered our garden endlessly and my mother was mostly busy with the welfare of her three dogs. Something, more important for sure, was taking place in the old world. I had a copy of one article printed and kept inside my school geography book where I could read and reread without raising any suspicion about my scholastic interests. It was by Francois Truffau written about a certain trend in the French cinema. That trend, as he had summarized, had struck a chord that kept resonating inside my restless and curious mind. It was revolutionary, calling for transcending all thematic and narrative forms and in abandoning it, to do what Alexandre Astruc had been saying since 1948; creating a cine d’auteur, where the director can write with the camera the same way a writer or a poet does by using a pen and words. Isn’t that something? To demolish the staid, established conventions and create the new wave… the real all new thing.

I looked again at the lonely sailboat and decided to add more white to its starboard. I thought it needed a touch of definition. The lack of definition is what ruins ideas, concepts and paintings. I did manage to mix the colors and approached the painting with a triumphant step, only to take a few steps back and under a second-thought’s doubt, I decided to turn the painting toward the window to be facing the light. Thinking of the light took my mind again to the city of light. I put the brush aside and tried to chase away the invading memories.

Neither art nor life can have fixed rules. My father had died unexpectedly causing me to freak up totally. I had aunt Huguette in Lille but had no reason to seek her help so I had succeeded in convincing myself that I am an above average student capable of studying for the fearful second Baccalaureat in order to get a place at the Sorbonne. There, I would find a way to come closer to those men whose names had become icons in my secret life as a daydreamer: The likes of Godard, Truffau, Renoir and Rossellini. Add Vadim and Malle to the list before I forget please. Life was an endless promise and that promise was a very satisfying one.

So, against the wish of every one in my family and friends, I landed the city of light on a cold and windy day that was still a lot warmer than my hometown. I had a tip from a baker in the mall we used to visit on Sundays about an old relative of his who rents a third floor, three-bedroom apartment. The house turned out to be the oldest structure I have ever been inside since I was born. It was probably the oldest structure in the crooked street with the funny name. Rue des Capucins was where some monks used to live centuries ago. The baker’s older sister was married to a man who owned and operated a bakery. I loved the bakery connection that had taken me from a huge, regional Canadian mall to the street level of an old house, tucked away in a very old street where both were named after the monks. I was delighted by the idea of being able to buy bread at two versions of one bakery, both being run by the same family but separated by a large ocean and a lot of history. Several phone calls were made by the Canadian baker to his French relatives. I was given the name, address and phone number of the Patisserie des Capucins and advised that I must remember to mention the brother’s name every time I shop there in order to be able to get every thing at discount. At the time, it seemed to be the perfect way to look for a real change; you start by a change of bakeries. And as it had turned out, it was not at all a bad start for a young and clueless teenager, having secured where to sleep and where to get the daily bread.

Moments of every beginning are usually the most powerful in all stories, particularly love stories, and in this case, I had loved the place at first sight. Certainly at first smell. The street was winding down to a large boulevard and it was so tiny, like nothing I have seen out of Old Quebec so far. It gave you an instant sense of intimacy, a vague feeling of belonging, of a sheltered existence out there where every one knows every one and all are getting a share of a dense, intense taste of life. Every house had its own character and unique touch, its own different shops, doors and windows and I still remember that it had its own aroma. I dwelled on the aroma and flavor of the freshly baked cakes, bread and croissants that had been penetrating my nostrils wildly since that first time and until today and had been soaking all my memories day after day after day.

Pourtant je me leve de bonne heure,

Presque tous les jours de ma vie,

Et j’egorge en plein soleil,

Les plus beaux reves de mes nuits..

In the beginning there was the tower; the Eiffel tower. Every morning it was waiting for me there like an old and faithful friend… a friend that had influenced an endless number of excited and curious crowds to come from every imaginable corner of the globe, to this point where I was standing ready with my camera to do the art work. Many tourists had their little cameras with them but my catalogue was impressive and they would generally end up buying my photos. I had to have La Tour in every photo. I’d align tourists to have it in the background and keep arranging them in small groups to pose for a good shot. I had a schedule of dozens of tour bus companies and knew who was arriving and when. Business was booming since day one and I loved it although I had kept telling myself that wedding photographers are probably the least creative and tourist photographers come second after them, but I was fully aware that I needed to keep trying to have my own destiny in my own hands, and short of having to gain money by being a wedding photographer, quel horreur, life would temporarily keep going.

Tour buses came and tour buses left and new tour buses came again. I would watch the tourists coming down the bus steps in a bewildering mix of ecstasy and euphoria. I have followed them with my own curious eyes even before the bus came to a total halt. Their heads were twisting and their necks were twirling and their eyes were widening, trying to capture the phallic construction of hardened steel pushing arrogantly skyward. Voila. Here it is at last. La Tour! It should be endowed, instead, with a purely masculine article of definition because, for honesty’s sake, it is nothing more than that; a victorious erection packing an endless level of energy, stamina and sheer power that had massaged the collective unconscious minds of millions and millions of men and women from every remote or near spot on the map. Watching them coming down the bus in a hurry, always in a hurry, as if going slowly may cause it to wane or weaken and it should be snapped instantly in a photo. This is another reason why God had created photographers, to capture life’s fleeting moments and ephemeral pulses. I stood there offering a hand.

Hello! Bonjour! Nice day. I can do a better photo. Yes for you all, a group photo? Only the six of you!? Ca va tres bien. Move this way please. Let us put the two lovely ladies in the center.

Now they pose obediently and forget about their own little cameras as they get lost in the mental process of focusing on their smiles. Some smiled hysterically and that made me laugh later. Some had wild smiles while others had more of a discrete smile. There were shy smiles, wanton smiles, triumphant smiles and sometimes forced smiles. All shapes and shades of smiles that can fill a huge index depicting every corner, nook and cranny inside the human psyche. Here it is; the greatest phallus available anywhere for free and they have started their pilgrimage God knows when and where, to come straight to its base after a long and probably a boring bus ride. Now it is in the background and they, all, are happy to have it standing guard behind them, throwing a long and intriguing shadow under the feeble morning sun. Every morning with a sun I was there. Every morning with no sun I was also there offering my sincere desire to help immortalize the memories.

When you stand behind the sharp lens of a quality camera for long, you start seeing things, new things, about human eyes for instance that you have always taken for granted. You can almost read the unspoken language that goes inside the group you are arranging for the photo. But no matter what you manage to read in their eyes, you will always find that faint touch of excitement. I have been fascinated by that human enthusiasm that erupts suddenly when they get their first look at what I alternatively had called La Tour, the Eiffel, or Mr. Eiffels’ construction to be more precise and more to the point. I have been intrigued by the different ways different tourist groups react to my dear Mr. Eiffel’s Opus Magnum. The Germans will come down the bus slowly and walk with measured steps before moving their eyes around the whole area then settling approvingly on the tower. The Italians will come down hastily, as if racing to get the first prize for who reaches there first, and most of the time they will be loud, jovial, laughing and shaking their hands vehemently as if suggesting another slant or shape for the tower to take. But the funniest were the Americans. They were mostly elderly, obese and either laughing or quiet. I could spot a group of American tourists even if they stood a mile away from where I was, by the amazing colors of their clothes: red, orange and green pants and pink, blue and checkered jackets, the ultimate in plastic disharmony, but who cares? When the photos were enlarged to 18 by 24 they became pretty impressive. Their smiles got bigger and it was just the perfect moment for me to bargain for any Western style apparel that they happened to have with them no matter if it never fits. Within the first month, I had accumulated a full set of Western gear complete with a cowboy hat, not exactly my size, a pair of extra large jeans, a cowboy shirt and a pair of shiny boots that had kept hurting my feet like hell until the leather eventually became softer and did fit my feet, or almost did. They didn’t speak any French and appreciated the fact that a young man like me, presumably French, spoke to them in their language, flawlessly. Judging by the way they had tipped me over what I had asked for, money was not among their problems, luckily.

I looked at the sun shivering behind the cold clouds and rearranged the laughing Americans again against the tower.

A little bit there, to the right. A large smile, please. Voila! And here is your receipt, my friends. My colleague is always there, day or night, rain or shine, and he will give you the photos in a plastic cover just like this one, protecting your photos all the way through your long voyage. He will be here in a couple of hours, by the time you finish lunch . . . Bon Voyage!

Americans were so innocent they never examined the receipts. They just folded them to stick in their shirt pockets. So when this one woman kept examining her receipt I knew she must be different. She turned out to be a suspicious Mexican from Texas and I assured her that she would love the photos. I didn’t see her again and I hope she did like her photos. I left her looking at me with an air of suspicion and went back to my bike, standing against a tree with my little patient dog sitting quietly in a basket at the back of the bike. I watched in amusement tourists in four buses who were having lunch baskets as my dog was having his third biscuit for the day.

"They will have their lunch first," I told the dog looking at me with weary eyes, then they get their photos. You have this biscuit for now and something better soon,

Talking to the silent dog, I was looking in its dark eyes wondering about the smiles I have been seeing in the human eyes for the last couple of hours and contemplating what a smile can tell on what may lurk inside the heart.

Haao! My dog used to comment on my wandering thoughts with one meaningless shout. My thoughts were interrupted by the single comment the dog made. Was that a comment on my promise for a better meal later? Or for what smiles can reveal about a person? Or was it a comment on nothing in particular? I hugged my tiny friend, covered it with the blanket and biked away whistling most of the time. When I reached my favorite kiosk on the Champs Elysees, I stopped for a newspaper while my eyes scanned the two-dozen papers and magazines hanging there. It was more of the same in all of them; Demonstrations. That was the day before for sure, but a glimpse on the street ahead showed me that demonstrations were the order of the day also and probably the following day as well. Young people were angry for reasons I couldn’t understand and therefore I didn’t bother to know. Demonstrations interrupt my business because it endangers tourism and certainly wouldn’t offer me any help as a photographer at the base of the Eiffel. Could someone convince the demonstrators to find somewhere else for their outcry, another city maybe? My mind was busy calculating how much would I lose on a daily basis if such demonstrations wouldn’t come to an end, when a young man, almost my age, approached offering me and everyone else in the street, a one page flier with an agonized headline: Why we demonstrate?? I took the flier with a fake smile, put it inside my newspaper and aimed at the Capucins, after all, I had a hungry dog in the little basket and I was getting hungry myself.

The old house was deep inside the Cul de sac, a street that dead ended a few houses to the left. The house had three stories that had four units each. The old wooden stairs squeaked non-stop, but more so at night, every time some one came down or went up. In my first month it was difficult to sleep as the stairs had a sharp and penetrating noise that needed some time for me to become familiar with. So, I had kept the windows open and this in turn brought all sort of noises from the street, including an accordion player in the first floor who played passionate and melancholic songs all through the night. There was a tenor Sax player, somewhere, who played only during the day making me assume that he had a night shift that took him away all night. Across the street, there was a round-faced, very thin ballet dancer in the second floor. She had a large balcony with a white long curtain. The wind would keep moving her fluttering curtain rhythmically as if in tandem with her pirouettes and pas a deux, twisting and twirling and whirling in weightless steps. She had performed with such dexterity that I imagined she had no need to open her eyes and performed with fully closed eyes. In the process, I had a free, front seat for a great performance.

All in all, the Rue des Capucins had thrown on me an indescribable jolt of joie de vivre that included vibrations, smells, sounds, scenes and on top of it all, I could have a full schedule of free entertainment day and night.

Henry the baker had a wheelchair-bound sister. Josephine was the oldest of his siblings, I was told. She lived alone in the largest apartment on the Third floor. That is where I ended up sharing the place for almost nothing and she was a kind and intelligent person who knew Italian, Greek, Latin, Slovak and God knows what other languages. I’d heard that she had been a teacher before developing advanced arthritis. Nevertheless, I never dared to ask about her situation and she never volunteered any information, clearly as I didn’t show any curiosity. She once asked me if I may help her improve her English, so I had seen an opportunity to swap English lessons for three meals a day and, of course, the nominal rent. When this woman smiled, a huge grin would be pouring over all of her features and not only her mouth. I’d think often of this when I watch certain tourists smile by just squeezing their lips when I align them against the Eiffel to ready them for a group photo.

That day, on my return earlier than usual, she was in the kitchen peeling carrots and trimming vegetables, which gave me an indication of what I would have for supper. I headed for the makeshift dark room I had rigged in a corner of my bathroom and started developing that morning’s crop of eight rolls. I couldn’t help smile happily for what we had; eight rolls here alone and probably another eight that my partner had for one single morning. That was very good business so far and one hoped that the demonstrations wouldn’t keep going on endlessly. I hoped that sooner or later those demonstrators would run out of energy and head home to see their mothers or girl friends.

My thoughts were interrupted by the dog running back from the kitchen. Josephine had already offered him a big lunch. Judging by experience, it would end up having a serious nap at her feet. It is very good for both dogs and street photographers to have a friend. I thought how vital friendship is for both then started setting the table. Josephine had her eyes on a crucifix hanging on the wall as she whispered a prayer. That is about all the decorations she had on her walls. On my room walls it was a different story. I had movie posters that I got for free from a used bookseller who liked two large photos of his stand on the river that I had taken. It was my very first deal and I like a good deal. I am not chasing the lost time intentionally, but these were the days of my youth. Days of fast deals on every front. I used to eat fast, move fast, talk fast and think fast, not because I was always in a hurry as one may be led to believe, but because I was almost obsessed and fully aware of the value of time. I hated to waste the least portion of it in any non-productive pursuit. I couldn’t wait until Josephine takes her time to finish her meal, and I had no doubts that she would understand. I guess I was living on a different time and tempo than your average person, and my dog was not your average dog for that matter. When I left the room, both the dog and the seated friend were taking it easy. A sense of thick and endless peace was saturating the scene.

Once in my room, I looked at the clock and had to jump to my feet.

Mama Mia! It is already two O’clock, I gasped.

She had seen me and kept looking with that vague, serene smile on her reddish face. She shook her head in silent approval. I reached for my empty camera to load a fresh film inside.

Mama Mia, I repeated in a whisper, you have to ask Jesus, I continued addressing her that this turns out to be a very good season and that millions of rich American tourists come to Paris without their little cameras, so that I can sell them millions of photos and get myself a real camera and a real dark room,

Her lips were moving in silence. I hoped it was the prayer I was waiting for.

II

I pushed the bicycle in the boisterous traffic. Bonjour and Ciao were sent and received repeatedly from every shop and pedestrian as I had already become a local celebrity. I could never understand the secret of the Rue des Capucins, once you enter it, you immediately sense an invisible aura of peace, tranquility and laisser-fair . . . but once you had left the serpentine street and reached the large boulevard, the traffic was hectic and drivers became simply wild. I had developed the lousy habit of finding quarrels among drivers amusing. The anger, grimaces and scowling accompanied by some unclear words, can’t escape the attention of a photographer. It was an unflattering portrait of man outside his natural habitat, I say this assuming that humans were designed to live on large green valleys, dwell in cute little seaside towns and certainly not live in crammed, underground tubes like sardines or drive metal boxes on wheels in overcrowded streets that end up making neurotic robots of even the best uncle in your family. That day, I cut across the maddening traffic carrying my bike on my shoulder to the middle of the road. There were many posters announcing a rally for the communist party on one side of the wall and on the other side, a huge poster of a pensive Charles de Gaulle with a caption that read "Oui! Pour la France".

Once I could cross the broad avenue, always running through a pause in the interminable traffic. I would find myself in a relatively quiet area of elegant apartment houses, a couple of boutiques, a pharmacy and a little café. The following intersection had an elegant hotel that occupied the whole block, with a large restaurant in the first floor as well as a roof garden with another restaurant and a bar. Denis, the other photographer, had an uncle who was an accountant there and through him I had landed this lucrative work less than two months after my arrival to the big city. We had excellent meals late evenings and the work was sheer fun. I used to enter from the rear and lock the bike in a yard on the street level then change my cowboy shirt and hat into a white shirt, coat and necktie. A brief look in the small mirror on the wall had convinced me that I am seeing another person, a stranger, looking at me so I offered him a genuine grin and was ready to go on the business of the evening. The camera was inside a leather brown bag strapped on my shoulder. I went to the top floor with my camera on the ready with the flash and everything. It was still early evening in a lazy summer but the place was almost full of diners and dancers. You couldn’t see any real young people here and my understanding was that all the young ones are meeting somewhere to plan a street demonstration for the following day. Only middle-aged bourgeois who were very satisfied with life and with themselves were there. These were the ones who were always in good mood, ready to enjoy a five course dinner with an average of three drinks, dance the night out until the wee hours and get photos of their girl-friends doing the Cha-cha-cha. These were my clients.

The large bar extended the whole length of the restaurant and to the left a five-musician-band was playing. I liked seeing them in their black bow-ties, white coats and black pants. Comparing them to the young crowds waving their fists in the streets was comforting and made you feel that the world was still a place of order and commonsense. The patrons were usually a mix of all nationalities and many of them were habitués who knew every one of the musicians and probably every member of the staff. As soon as the music had started a slow step dance, it was time for me to start shooting and my flash kept glowing, throwing light on meaningful moments in the lives of those dancing and, in the process, documenting the emotional surge, typically après diner, that had set the heads of long-haired girls resting on the shoulders of tall and mustachioed dark-haired men. I became always aware that you need to think in terms of black and white and that every other detail is just a marginal footnote on the infinite panorama of real life. If the flash bounces indirectly and you get the eyes almost closed, you can show a lot of romance in the photo and that is what sells. But if you don’t aim correctly and end up having stunned wide-open eyes, or shocked eyes squinting in self-defense, then you have blown it. In my dark room I have seen thousands of pairs of eyes. I looked deep in them trying to measure what could have lurked down in their hearts, trying to read whatever the isolated eyes can reveal. When I immersed the photo paper in the colorless solution inside my makeshift laboratory, the eyes were the first things to show under the chemical solution as very faint rounds of undefined gray, developing slowly against the pale background to take shape. Then they turn into eyelashes, eyebrows and eventually whole eyes looking at you in curious inquiry. As if asking; do you remember me? And I would remember them. A little parcel of a human soul and body that was present, happily, at a dinner dance. The chemical solution was helping me recreate, in a magic-like process the moments that I know are gone forever. Here are your real Parisian moments Mr. Tourist, and they liked it so much that their hands will move as