3:AM Magazine

By Steven Rogers.

I arrive home from shopping and although I live alone, I find a short, fat racist man standing half-naked in my kitchen. Through the steam, I acknowledge his presence by giving a nod and a bonjour. He reciprocates, slightly abashed, and scuttles, penguinesque, to a room at the end of the hallway, towel wrapped round him from his waist down. I walk between the puddles of water he’s left on the floor, and proceed to unpack the groceries. As I put the pork chops in the fridge, I notice he’s left his underpants draped over my microwave.

I know the man is short because he comes up to the height of my chest. Fat may be a tad harsh on him, but let’s just say middle-age has long got the better of him. I see why he’s treating my kitchen like some kind of Turkish bath since this is the room where the shower is. And despite his novel use of cooking apparatus, I can’t complain about his being in my flat. He owns it. His name is Philippe.

As Eric Blair might tell you, when you’re down and out in France’s capital, life does not go too easy on you. Two months previously, having spent weeks without a job and dossing on friends’ floors, I’m relieved to find someone – the uncle of a friend of a friend – who’s prepared to rent me a room, no questions asked.

When Philippe and I hammer out a cash-in-hand deal in the dimly lit room, I can’t help thinking that he reminds me of someone: A dark, slightly receding hairline, eyes bulging a bit out of a saggy face, his jowls pushed up by a turtle neck under a V-neck sweater. It’s when he exhales a burst of cigar smoke, and leans forward offering me one, that I realise he is, at least in looks, a French version of Del Boy.

How do I know Philippe is a racist? I’m unaware of it when I agree to rent the room from him. It’s not really a trait I look for in landlords. Neither do I bank on his invading the sanctuary of my abode on a bi-monthly basis thereafter, but that’s what he’ll do whenever he comes to Paris on ‘business’. And that’s when we’ll have our kitchen rendezvous.

I discover that Philippe is not completely like his Brit sitcom alter-ego during the first of his visits while I’m his tenant.

Making friendly chat as we both prepare our evening meals, I comment on the profusion of Portuguese bars in the neighbourhood, Paris’s working-class twelfth arrondissement.

“Oh, the Portuguese are fine,” he retorts. “They’re hard-working and they go about their business quietly. I certainly prefer the Portuguese coming here than the Arabs and the Niggers.”
 
I feel my jaw drop like a guillotine and stop peeling the potatoes. That utterance has left me dumbstruck. I turn to him, though he carries on tossing his salad, oblivious to the effect his words have on me.

“Why’s that then?” I ask, my eyes still fixed on him.

“Well, they don’t cause us any bother,” he says, concentrating intently on chopping his tomatoes. He stops and looks up at me. “Not like the stupid Black and Arab yobbos that are invading us and sponging off of us. Would you like to eat with me?”
 
I decide to take him up on his offer, my curiosity overriding my repulsion. We carry our plates to his room, normally locked while I’m in the flat on my own, and sit down at his table.
 
The room is a dusty store of old books, clothes, knick-knacks and files, and its yellowed, swirly-patterned wallpaper, peeling at the edges, exudes an old-school France. It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what belongs to Philippe and what belongs to his late mother, who used to own the flat. One thing’s for sure: The recent issues of Français D’Abord, the National Front publication, stacked on the corner of his table, have not been inherited from his parent.

Philippe turns on the television with the remote control and flicks through a few channels before settling on one. He pours himself a glass of wine and offers me one, smiling avuncularly, and I’m trying to work out whether what just happened in the kitchen actually just happened, but Jean-Marie Le Pen’s grinning face on the front of Français D’Abord is confirming for me that it did.
 
As we eat, we watch a documentary about the sinking of a fishing boat off the Brittany coast and possible foul play involved. There’s an interview with a widow of one of the fisherman that perished, a pretty black woman. While she laments the loss of her husband, Philippe chips in with his two penn’orth.

“It never ceases to amaze me how stupid the Bretons are. They seem to find Negresses attractive. The Bretons are a bunch of morons, that’s what I say.”

He looks over to me, shaking his head.

It’s a bit difficult to stomach now, both the food and the conversation, and so I decide to call it a night. As I excuse myself, I ask to borrow some copies of the magazines by way of some enlightening bedtime reading. Philippe is only too happy to oblige.

In bed, I flick through the pages and similar stories crop up again and again, namely about the alleged spiralling of ‘anti-French’ attacks carried out by youths of North African descent.

I lay awake and ponder the dilemma I find myself in, trying to digest the fact that my landlord is a member of a far right organisation and I’m indirectly supporting them since my rent could feasibly be used to fund his subscription. I’d rather not be doing that, but then it’s taken so long for me to find a place to live, I don’t want to have to go through that jobless-homeless scenario again.

The next morning, I wake up to the sound of rainwater tap-tapping on the roof and trickling down the gutter next to my window. I half-open an eye and can see that I fell asleep without turning off my bedside lamp.

I suddenly remember that during the night I had a dream in which I find out that my landlord/occasional flatmate is a foul-mouthed racist and the discovery doesn’t make me feel too good.

I wriggle over to the side of the bed to turn the lamp off, and in doing so something falls off the duvet on to the floor. I look down and see that it’s a copy of Français D’Abord.

I take a deep breath and plop my head back down on the pillow, not really feeling at all like facing the day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

3:AM co-editor Steven Rogers fell into the oft-followed career path of many a language graduate, that of teaching and translating. He has lived and worked in Perpignan, Pamplona and Paris, teaching English for three years at the Sorbonne. He now earns his keep as a Dublin-based journalist. At the weekends he is Bedwhisperer. 

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, April 20th, 2007.