Le chat qui se faufile dans chez nous

by David Benjamin

“When it rains in Paris, it bleeds into swift little gutters. You can see your reflection over its mercury embryo.” 

― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

PARIS — An apartment in Paris is like Nietzsche’s abyss. It looks into you, senses your weaknesses and spoils for its chance to pounce. 

Twenty-five-odd years ago, in an onset of wild conjecture, we mortgaged a cinquième-étage walkup 123 steps from the courtyard,. Since then, this abode has sprung upon us myriad surprises, both charming and alarming, but more of the latter. Apartment trouble in Paris is inevitable, but especially if your building dates back to sometime in the 17th century.

There’s a photo of our doorway, circa 1880. A painted slattern leans against a ragged clochard, both smoking tailor-mades and smirking at the lens. This street was once a shantytown peopled by hookers, hustlers, cutthroats and thieves. Just turning the corner at night could plunge you liver-deep into the dark unknown. 

Now, rue St. Séverin teems with tourists in t-shirts seeking cut-rate “cuisine française authentique.” Its only pimps are fondue-hawkers and the greatest danger is heartburn. The only mayhem that awaits Hotlips and me comes after we’ve climbed the stairs to see what fresh hell our humble garret might have in store.

Since we occupied this apartment—just beneath the building’s roof—we have become, for example, connoisseurs of leaks. One translates the word as fuite but, more often, the correct term is inondation (flood). 

Over time, we’ve learned that normal rain, falling gently from the blue-gray clouds that scud constantly across Proust’s plain from the Atlantic, will not pierce our defenses. But Paris often gets windblown squalls that drive rain horizontally, penetrating the powdery seams between our limestone walls (cosmetically smeared with decrepit stucco) and the 400-year-old oak beams that support the roof. 

In these storms, raindrops worm their way—along beams and through fissures in plaster that has devolved to sponge and dust—until the water emerges in a crooked trickle that creeps down our tallest wall and puddles on the floor below. Or it might slither patiently, probingly, along one of ceiling timbers, until it finds a knothole or a porous pocket of decay, and snakes through—drip-dripping ’til the storm has passed.

By now, these little fuites are water off a canard’s back, too brief and feeble to even damage paint and barely heavy enough to  fill a teacup. The inondation that got out attention, though, was when the eavestrough outside our dormer sundered a seam, redirecting a torrent from the drainspouts to our wall beneath the gutter. Paint curled away, plaster collapsed and flagstones were exposed in hues of gray and sickly green. For awhile, until we convinced the syndic (building management) to repair the fractured gouttière, this performance recurred with every rainfall. 

A dozen years later, we finally hired a merry craftsman named Girard to plaster over the ugly scar in our living room. 

But there’s worse! The leak we fear above all is one that takes place secretly while we’re away. We know it will happen, but we can never guess when our chaudier—water heater and furnace—will give up its ghost and kick the bucket. When it does, the entire bucket gushes onto floor and carpet, forming a lake that threatens with inondation our elegant downstairs neighbor, Madame Adam. Not only does this mess await our next arrival, it denies us both warmth and hot water until we can track down a plumber who will—in his own sweet Parisian time (which runs roughly 75 percent slower than the Greenwich Time observed elsewhere on earth)—shlep a new chaudier up our staircase and install it. 

We are now awaiting the death of our third chaudier.

We’ve also had two refrigerators, two washing machines and a couple of kitchen ranges, the latest of which features a temperamental oven that works—or chooses not to work—according either to its mood or horoscope. We have a range hood, too, but it hasn’t actually functioned since around 2002. Luckily, we don’t have room for a dishwasher, nor are we foolhardy enough to want one.

Notwithstanding their other qualities, the French make lousy kitchen appliances. Yes, French blenders are fun to use and exceptionally durable. Any larger device, however, tends to bristle with booby traps—brittle switches, sparky synapses, inaccessible lightbulbs and instruction manuals written in Swedish by Koreans. French white goods are prone to inexplicable outbursts of groaning and crackling from deep within their bowels and to tantrums that devolve into inert pouting. They are haunted by an existentialist death wish. And they leak.

The leak I actually wished for, but never got, was from our current fridge, a sleek Electrolux whom we try to humor by calling him Chilly Willy. This freezer has plastic drawers that harbor one’s frozen quiche and ice cubes. Our problem with Chilly Willy’s drawers, is that, by and by they froze to his rear wall. Faced with Willy’s immovable drawers, I discovered that this freezer isn’t independently defrostable. Turning off the fridge doesn’t stop the freezer freezing. I thought of unplugging Willy. But this posed implications, for the apartment’s whole electric grid, that I dared not ponder. A Paris apartment husbands its revenge and awaits its moment. Moreover, I had no strategy to protect Mme. Adam from the inondation likely to accompany a defrosting adventure that ganged a-gley.

I spent a couple of feckless hours trying to chip away at Willy’s icy grip, but then resorted to simple, efficient violence. I bashed a hole the face of the plastic drawer. Chilly Willy braved the attack, saluted my boldness and refrigerated on. The freezer continues to freeze and we, after several years, have ice again.

If I seem to suggest that a Paris apartment is a living thing in which inanimate objects connive, conspire and communicate amongst one another to punish the trespass of human inhabitants, well, yeah.

But there are also animate beings. Once, in our absence, a family of pigeons solved the little window in our little toilet. Ma and Pa Pigeon set up housekeeping, laid eggs and raised fledglings. The whole brood crapped up a storm. Our loft is too high up for rats to climb, but the puddles on the roof are an ideal nursery for city mosquitoes. These are a species invisible until they light on a white wall—which they never do. They can only be discerned by the shrilling of their tiny wings after they’ve left behind a pattern of itchy lumps.

We’ve had two cat incursions. Smoky was a charcoal-hued chartreuse with the personality of a dog. He made a habit of sprawling on the courtyard ’til people stumbled by. Then he would follow us up, explore our rooms, and prowl our mezzanines. He would submit graciously to rubbing and petting. He enjoyed naps in our bathroom sink. His mistress, a matronly lady who lived high on an adjoining staircase, had to climb down five flights and then up five more to reclaim the cat (whose real name was not Smoky). We would apologize for borrowing the cat, she would say, “De rien,” and, next day, Smoky would be waiting at our door, eager to indulge once more in the cool porcelain of our salle de bain.

Our latest cat is George, a black and white who enters through door, window or skylight. If nothing’s open, he sits outside staring, like Nietzsche, through the glass, into our domestic abyss. The  roofs and rain gutters are his highway. Whenever we’re present, he assumes ownership of both us and our garret. George’s actual owner, whom we’ve never seen, is blasé about his lengthy absences. When I woke up this morning, George—who had spent the night— was purring on my chest and prickling me with his claws.

I’ll think about maybe finding his owner when I see “Chat perdu” posters—with a daguerrotype of George—taped to the fence around St. Séverin.