Part I:
The most-famous piece in the Louvre is the Mona Lisa. The second-most famous piece can be viewed free of charge, without even entering the museum. It is the massive glass and steel pyramid on top of the lobby of the Louvre complex that rises out of the ground like a sword of modernity piercing through the armor of history. In The Da Vinci Code, this is a secret symbol indicating the resting place of the body of Mary Magdalene. At the beginning of the film, a villain calls it “a scar on the face of Paris.”
I arrived at the Metro stop where my class had agreed to rendezvous on an unseasonably warm and sunny Thursday morning. The front pocket of my green hoodie was stuffed with five pages of notes and analysis on Jacques Louis David’s Le Serment des Horaces. Officially, we were there to give presentations on various chefs d’ouevre of romantic and neoclassical French art, but the truth is that we were there for the same reason as the hundreds of rather dazed-looking people shuffling around in the dazzling light beneath the pyramid. One goes to the Louvre to say that they were there. It is the most visited museum in the world.
Throngs of Asian tourists milled about in the hall of French neoclassicists and ruined some of the atmosphere I had hoped to cultivate with my presentation, which is a journey from pre-Revolutionary France to the fascist movements of the 21st century by way of Roman mythology and Freudian phalluses.
The Louvre was once a palace; the communards of 1871 tried to burn it down. I got lost on the way out. Befitting a museum of such grandeur, the exit is not through a gift shop but through a mall. On my long walk back to the metro I passed the Apple Store and Pandora and Swatch and Tommy Hilfiger. This underground complex – officially called Carrousel du Louvre – is somewhere between the ultramodern architecture of the atrium and the palatial design of the art gallery. Huge displays of glass and advertisement are framed by shiny marble floors and walls underneath high ceilings. No one seemed to be speaking French.
Part II
The Twentieth Arrondisement is officially the last one in the city. For most visitors, its main attraction is the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise, where Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and Edith Piaf are buried. It is north of the Seine and far off the beaten path; I’m confident that less than five percent of the tourist masses I shoved my way through that morning will visit the 20th before their return flight.
I was not there to pay my respects to any famous artists, but to fulfill an academic obligation. Three of the twelve credit hours I receive in this study abroad program are for something called my “engagement in Paris.” Students have four options for fulfilling this: classes on urban design, working as a teaching assistant in an elementary school, participating in an urban farm, or open-ended volunteer work. Longing for a return to the absolute lack of supervision I enjoyed in Latin America this summer, I opted for the latter. Naturally, a midterm deadline was coming up and I had not yet completed any hours.
So it was that I arrived at the last metro stop in Paris on Thursday afternoon with my Le Serment des Horaces notes still in my pocket. I came up the stairs and walked up and down the street twice, searching for the place that the website had described. Both times I walked past an alley that I assumed couldn’t have been the place. To describe this alley, I have to borrow another word from the Zapatistas. It was very Otroa, very Other. There was garbage littered everywhere; a few dozen people – most of them black, some of them middle eastern-looking – were hanging out there carrying everything they owned on their backs. Some of them had set out rows of shoes and t-shirts in front of them in a way that resembled the giant informal markets in Latin America.
I realized later that the reason I walked past this place twice wasn’t the homeless people or the litter, but my subconscious reaction to the smell. It’s very difficult to describe smells, especially this one: foul, a mix of piss and shit and sweat and rotting food and fear. If I had to give it a name I would call it the smell of the third world. I knew it from Guatemala and Mexico. I walked past it because I didn’t know that smell could live in France.
But it did. This was the entrance to L’Un est L’Autre, and I was going to become a volunteer there.
Part III
The building at the end of the alley is a cafeteria the size of a suburban McDonald’s. For three hours every Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, it feeds around nine hundred people. They line up outside for hours beforehand and are cycled in fifty at a time.
The work for volunteers is simple and labor-intensive. Break baguettes into even fourths, then roll up napkins around plastic knives and forks like little tortillas, then put canned peaches into plastic cups, then be a lunchlady for dozens of malnourished people.
The other volunteers were very friendly. A Franco-Peruvian guy of about thirty chatted with me about Mexico’s World Cup performance. A 72-year old woman told all of us dirty jokes but made me take my hat off indoors. A girl from New Zealand translated everything into English for a Turkish grad student who didn’t understand much French.
There is something awe-inspiring about the woman who directs a kitchen that is about to feed enormous amounts of people. They’re like generals, always composed, always moving around and making a dozen calculations in their head at once and giving orders without making them seem like orders. My mom is like this on Thanksgiving. One of my Irish aunts always displays a similar military efficiency whenever we visit. I will tell you another time about a Zapatista woman I met who ran a restaurant with one hand and held a baby boy in the other.
Our general was around sixty with dyed red hair and an unlit cigarette permanently in her mouth waiting for a free moment that would never come. She remembered everyone’s name the first time they told her and spoke in at least four languages. The general told me with pride that some of the volunteers were French juvenile delinquents doing their community service and that many of them had continued to come back after the court mandate ended.
Part IV
It came time to open for business. I was at the front of the serving table; my jobs were to give everyone plastic cups and be the first person to say to them warmly “Bonsoir! Bon appetit!” Each person was entitled to a piece of chicken tenderloin, ravioli with marinara sauce, a quarter baguette, a cup of canned peaches, a slice of cake, coffee, and water.
Our guests were Black, Brown, White, African, Syrian, Moroccan, Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and who knows what else. They were mostly men between twenty and fifty, but the elderly, disabled, and women with young children were allowed in first and waited on by the general.
The foul smell seemed like a distant bad dream in here. This was simply like any other restaurant, full of people talking to each other and enjoying a decent meal. I looked around me and thought about how so many of these people must spend their whole day, or their whole life, being ignored. At the margins of Paris, the Paris Below, those people are afforded the dignity of going to a restaurant and having a nice time.
The danger of living in the world inside the glass pyramid is that you think it’s the normal world. The truth is that the world Above is a wild exception to the rule, and most people live Below, without Apple stores and air conditioning and assurance of the next meal. But outside of those comforts, it turns out that people are still people, still capable of joy and pain, still deserving of love and security. L’Un est L’Autre: the one is the other (or the otroa).
Once everyone was fed we wiped the tables and mopped the floors and sat down together to eat the leftovers and talk. Someone found a bottle of wine, and the general finally lit her cigarette and posed us a question: if you had a magic baguette, what would you do with it?
The Franco-Peruvian answered: “I would end climate change.”
The 72-year-old woman responded: “I would get rid of all borders and nations and religions.”
I would make all of the Above, in Paris and elsewhere, spend a night serving and sharing with all of the Below, and then maybe we would all knock down that glass pyramid together.
Encuentros 