Precarious Lease

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There is a stretch of the Paris border where the city ends as if in a cliff. The natural slope of the land is visible in the hill of a park. Around it, accommodation for the rectilinear has been made, and buildings sit flat, the streets terraced. On the descent you pass the Métro Pré-Saint-Gervais, obscure stop of a circular. You cross the Boulevard Sérurier, one of twenty-two bending along the city’s perimeter and named for Napoleonic marshals. There are tramlines, taut of wire, and the Périphérique highway, the city’s ring road, which throws light. From there the suburbs fall away to the northeast, the land below them sinking. This view serves to dignify the area’s desultory pizza parlors, its bar, and its other bar, the one for placing bets.

I went there one October afternoon to look at a construction site. I had moved back to Paris after three years away, and I still knew this address by heart. It was written as if unsettled, as a range: 58-62, rue de Mouzaïa. A few more buildings and the road runs out, Sérurier taking the relay. I had come from that direction.

Because of the building’s location, because of its many tall windows, it could reflect the weather over the suburbs. Within Paris it served those suburbs as an embassy, as one of the occupants, one of the squatters, had long ago told me. Police had evicted those squatters in December 2013. Since then, for four years and ten months, the building had stood empty. It was empty as I took it in, in 2018. At a glance, I saw the windows had been replaced. A sign put up by the city indicated construction would run through 2020. But the glass was black and clean. The building’s stories, eight in number, glittered. Below them lay four basements.

I wouldn’t be able to see it in full. Corrugate hid a man who was shouting, a worker, a temporary wall. Concrete gapped to show metal supports, twisting, rusted. Across the first story snaked engravings, words, a 1974 work by the French sculptor Catherine Val. Menacing nouns, they were nearly oracular: Storm-Cold-Wind-Cold. Shaped like a hinge, the building was wider than it was tall. Caught in the fold of its wings was a sizeable courtyard where the occupants had, I knew, cultivated bamboo and, in their idiosyncrasy, trussed up a disco ball. Far oversized, ten feet across, it cast a fractured light into every room.

Yards away, a man was watching me. He stood still, as I did, and on the same sidewalk. The messy hair and baggy clothes scanned, from where I stood, as homelessness—I looked away. The stare could not be returned politely. He has the right, I thought—a French expression. I am looking at the city, and this man is looking at me. Moving, I also felt, would have provoked him, a feeling I was not exactly proud to register. Years ago we might have both gone on ahead into that building. I trained my attention on more signs hung by the municipal government, temporary, detailing the history of the place: something to read until 2020, consolation. Here, or around here, lay rebellious Belleville village, incorporated into Paris in 1860. Quarries came to my mind, as did defensive ramparts called the Thiers Fortifications. At their base extended a no-build zone on which drifters contrived shacks of sheet metal and scrap, building all the same. The architectural movement Brutalism had in the twentieth century bestowed on Paris this edifice for use by a regional Directorate for Health and Social Affairs. (The architecture was “inspired by ‘bunkers,’” as one could read in local news, Le Parisien.) I used my phone to photograph the signs. One gave the squat’s name, Le Bloc, an acronym of the squatters’ devising for bâtiment libre, “free building,” occupé citoyennement, “occupied by citizens” though with an adverb that is nonstandard, as “citizenly” would be in English. One look at it, and a homeless man comes and stares at you accusingly. The sign’s summary made much of “art” produced within but did not say what kind of art it was. A professional had told Le Parisien of an intent for “certain works” to remain. Many were murals, immovable. “Because there’s some very
interesting stuff,” the project manager continued. Their employer would be converting the building to housing for students and “young workers”—130 students, 65 workers, with 14 “artists” to be accommodated across the extent of a coworking space. The state had transferred title for 6.7 million euros, which amounted to a 76 percent discount. That renovation would cost twenty-two million. As far as deals go, the building wouldn’t move.

I looked up, and the man was gone.

I started back the other way. For most of its length, the Rue de Mouzaïa serves country-style houses—brick walks and fitted shutters, brimming planters—along a wall of which I saw a window only painted on. It was a decoy. Curtains had been depicted in billowing.

That street empties out into the Rue du Général-Brunet, which quickly flows into the Rue Botzaris, border for a crescent-shaped park, Buttes-Chaumont. On that street that day I recognized a boot-shaped sign, swaying above its clapboard storefront. In the months after Le Bloc’s eviction, in that quiet season, I had brought the cobbler my own boots, which I conceded had to be resoled. I passed them over the counter. He looked back in horror. They were too far gone. Nothing to be done. I had worn down the heels to triangles. I looked at those heels with the man, as he did, almost ashamed. I got home to find a letter from Le Général, which I recognized by my own handwriting. This was the envelope I had addressed, stamped.

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