Paris Arrival of the Walking Dead, II: 75 Steps to Freedom

Last week, I began the story of my recent arrival in Paris after months of toil and a fitful overnight flight. I was also hauling a considerable amount of baggage. An extra 48-lb suitcase belonged to my daughter, who had to cancel her ticket when her student visa failed to arrive in time. My post left off with an Uber driver dropping me off near the Porte de Vincennes. I couldn’t get into my apartment in Saint-Mandé for a few more hours and was about to enter a Franprix grocery store, where I’d arranged (via the Bounce app) to store my baggage for the afternoon.

French retail spaces are tight, especially in Paris, where even in a grocery store, most shoppers use their own bags or a small basket to gather the items they plan to buy. There’s no wielding of oversized metal carts as in the United States. So, once inside, I parked myself as compactly as possible to one side of the entry and strove to catch an employee’s eye.

The closest candidate was the cashier. She leaned over a magazine, half-listening to a friend chatting away on the other side of the counter. When customers came to the register, she’d greet them and ring up their groceries. The friend would pause, and as the customer transferred their goods into their shopping bag, the chatter would resume as the cashier’s gaze returned to the magazine. After watching several shoppers come and go, I realized there would be no reliable opening in the ebb and flow of clientele to grab her attention.

I needed to leave my bags to find someone who could help me, and normally I would be willing to do so. However, if there happened to be wrongdoers nearby, my luggage was within a few feet of the nearest escape route, so I hesitated. My courage wasn’t bolstered by the sudden appearance of a disheveled and shaggy-looking character who staggered inside, wove about for several seconds, then left. Spotting a man stocking a shelf near the back of the store, I reluctantly stepped away from my bags only to watch him disappear behind swinging double doors before I could reach him. The cashier was my best bet.

With my bags still in jeopardy, I got behind the last customer and slowly advanced to the checkout. All transactions in France must begin with a polite bonjour, and if you can muster it, the intonation of this greeting should match the cheerful two-note quality that French people employ. That part was simple. Much harder was explaining to the clueless cashier that, yes, I had used an app called Bounce to reserve a spot somewhere within the market to store my baggage—baggage that she wasn’t able to see because it was over by the door, hidden from view behind the grab-and-go rack.

She looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, which I was, but luckily she understood enough of my babble to take me seriously and went to find a supervisor. I was pleased when the relaxed and smiling manager immediately seemed to know the drill. He helped me drag the bags to a locked room, sympathizing with the poundage (or should I say kiloage). After scribbling down my reservation number on a torn section of notebook paper and balancing it on the largest valise, he positioned the bags next to crates of produce and we left the room. I would be back in 3 to 4 hours.

Now free of my yoke, I wandered along the main thoroughfare, studying menus in search of my first Parisian meal. Friends have often asked me for Parisian restaurant recommendations. I don’t have any. When I first started traveling to France, I would read through the travel guides and identify two or three alluring dining establishments. This exercise slowly proved a waste of time. I’d arrive at the scouted location only to study the menu and find that it was more than I felt like paying, or that it wasn’t open, or that the day’s menu didn’t appeal as much as a slice of pizza and a Coke.

Restaurant menus were hard to evaluate online back then, so I developed a habit of browsing the physical menus posted on walls and placards until I found a suitable place not far from wherever I happened to be when hungry. That modus operandi has served me well. I’ve had a few so-so meals in Paris, but overall, the food is excellent, and on this day, the eggplant Parmesan I ordered in a brasserie near La Nation traffic circle was possibly the best I’ve ever eaten.

With time to kill, I pulled out French Like Moi, by Scott Carpenter, a book I’d started reading on the plane after a friend of this blog highly recommended it. I’m usually not a fan of memoirs that focus on the difficulties of being an expat living in France. I must admit part of my aversion is rooted in jealousy. As far as I’m concerned, anyone lucky enough to move to France should keep their trials and tribulations to themselves, unless they are trying to help me move there too. In this case, I’m glad I ignored my misguided instincts and started reading as soon as we left the ground. After we landed, the woman next to me asked what I’d been reading. We hadn’t exchanged a word throughout the flight. “It must be good; you were laughing all the way,” she commented.

Carpenter adeptly conveys the inescapable imbalance of sometimes going inaperçu among Parisians and sometimes sticking out like a sore thumb. If you’re an outsider, even if you were born in France, you simply aren’t part of the club. This doesn’t mean that Parisians aren’t often accommodating, even welcoming. But one needs to know one’s place, and that state of being proves extremely elusive. Carpenter employs this volatile backdrop to render a steady procession of comical anecdotes.

I slipped my sandals off while seated on the brasserie’s terrace—sandals I’d been wearing for the last 16 hours. I’d loved their sleek, classic design when picking them out days before I left. My feet, however, were losing their enthusiasm. I’d done nothing to break the shoes in, and blisters were starting to form. As I walked back to the Franprix, my feet had now turned angry. Their protests had been mild before lunch, but now they threatened to break windows and set fires if I didn’t immediately relieve their suffering. Fortunately, I had band-aids in my purse, and Paris is full of benches.

After convincing my feet that I still cared, I had a bit more time to burn, so I sat idly and people-watched, but my mind wandered, and soon I was wondering how I would make it the 0.8 miles from the Franprix to my rented apartment. I double-checked the apartment reservation I’d made 6 months earlier, and realized the building had no elevator and my place was on the fifth floor. Not only would I have to lug everything up four flights of stairs, but I’d have to lug the 48-pounder back down and across town to my daughter’s apartment once she arrived. That made no sense at all.

When I returned to the Franprix, I asked a third employee (since the cashier and original manager were nowhere to be found) if I could leave my daughter’s bag for a few more days. He nodded and indicated he was fine with the idea. “Do I need to go back in the Bounce app to pay for an extended time period?” He knew nothing about Bounce or any app but tried to reassure me that all would be okay, gesturing with his arms to indicate there was obviously enough space to hold the suitcase. Apparently, it therefore followed that I shouldn’t worry. A hurricane of fatigue overpowered the winds of caution, and I left the Franprix, now saddled with a mere 75 pounds of luggage to transport.

Ordinarily, distance equals rate multiplied by time. But I’d entered a reality where the coefficients for unfamiliarity and exhaustion were skewing the formula. It felt like forever to reach the apartment, and I arrived red-faced and out of breath. The directions for access were clearly explained: punch in a code to enter the building; find a particular mailbox and use another code to open it; inside was a lockbox requiring a third code; remove a key from the lockbox that would get me out of the foyer and into the apartment four stories above; close and reset the lockbox; and ensure the mailbox was tightly shut. If I ever have to deal with kidnappers, I can at least now be confident that I won’t bungle their instructions.

Once through the foyer, I dragged my load to the base of a wooden spiral staircase. I’d come so far, and yet had so far to go. There was only one way I was going to get myself and my belongings up those stairs. With the backpack now on my back, purse slung crossbody, I left my suitcase on the ground floor and wound my way to the second. There, I dropped the backpack and purse and returned to the ground floor to retrieve the suitcase. This I rest-stepped to the third floor, abandoned it in the cigarette-smoke-scented landing, and returned to the second floor for my purse and backpack, which I slowly humped to the fourth floor. And so on, until the six of us arrived at the apartment: me, my feet, suitcase, backpack, and purse, all of whom had come to harbor a strong dislike for the others.

I don’t recall much about the hours that followed before my head hit the pillow. By the next morning, however, we were all speaking to each other again, which was either a positive sign or evidence I’d done damage to my temporal lobe. The first order of business was buying groceries, but before I left the building, I made sure to count the steps I’d climbed the previous afternoon. There were 75 in all: 21 between the ground and second floor, and 18 per floor thereafter. Europe’s airy and elegant high ceilings come at a price. Over the next four weeks, I developed a fondness for my winding adversary, but not before one last trying test. But that’s another story.