The Mad People of Paris

I arrived in Paris on November 23, 2015, ten days after the Bataclan massacre took place.
The Parisians bore their grief swathed in a kind of invisible shawl. The silence of those days was a scarf made of the very air, wrapped close around the necks of the locals and us foreigners alike.
“Yes, peculiarly cold this winter, isn’t it?” said Mme Rachou in her elliptical Spanish, when I brought this up.
The feeling solidified when you rode the metro. Nobody talked. The babies didn’t cry. And the dogs, which you’re allowed to take with you on public transport there, didn’t make a sound either.
The apartment I got for myself was on the south side of Paris, in an area called Le Kremlin-Bicêtre. The university was in the north, in Pontoise. And for the entirety of the metro journey, which would take an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, I would hear no conversations, not a single word being spoken.
The only people who said anything on the metro were the mad people and the drunks.
In the case of the drunks, they tended to congregate at the ends of the platforms. Many of them were Russians. They had red, chapped faces. They were like the leftover bricks from a building site.
The mad people, on the other hand, were always alone—each connected up to the throng of voices inside their brains.
It wasn’t much different at the university itself. My stint as a guest researcher at the Laboratoire Linguistique, Dictionnaires et Informatique was due to last a year. This laboratory was, from what I could ascertain when looking into options for internships abroad, one of the most advanced institutes in my field, which was the application of computer science to questions of linguistics. But my colleagues didn’t seem to be programmed to say anything more than the cold, punctual “bonjour” they met me with each morning.
Certainly, my below-par French didn’t help.
The only opportunity to vent was on Wednesdays and Fridays, when I went to evening classes—language and French culture—at the Sorbonne.
The classes ended at 6 p.m. and a number of us sometimes went to one of the cafés on Boulevard du Montparnasse afterward. A Korean couple, a Dutch woman, and two Algerians, along with myself, were the regulars. The common language was English. We’d sit and talk for an hour, then go our separate ways.
And it would be back to the silence.
I would walk down to the Vavin metro stop and, rather than going home, get on line 4 in the direction of Saint-Michel. Almost without me realizing it, my footsteps would once more lead me to 9, Rue Gît-le-Cœur. I’d stand before the commemorative plaque and re-read the names of the legendary guests at what was once known as the Beat Hotel: “B. Gysin, H. Norse, G. Corso, A. Ginsberg, P. Orlovsky, I. Sommerville, W. Burroughs.”
I’d try to guess which room Ian Sommerville and William Burroughs had stayed in. It was there that the fresh-faced computer scientist, recently in from London, had accompanied the much older writer in the inferno of one of his countless detoxes.
I tended to feel very despondent on the way back from those excursions. In the metro, I thought about what would happen if I started shouting. From the look of me, people could well mistake me for an Islamist. And yet I was sure that the same would happen as I’d seen so many times when the normal run of things was disturbed in any way: in the end, my fit of madness would be buried by the stunning imperturbability of Parisians.
Other times, I had the idea of abandoning my doctoral thesis and putting my energies into developing some kind of software that would process the language of those voluble Paris down-and-outs. I envisaged a miraculous interface that would transmit the messages they were sending. I fantasized about the effect my discovery would have: the inhabitants of Paris getting to discover how alike they all were in their various solitudes. The end result being a global, fraternal embrace. Maybe even an orgy.
Clearly, I was depressed. It wasn’t long before the panic attacks began.
Or something very similar, because they never spiraled. Although, as Bogdan would later explain, the worst panic attacks were precisely that: the sense of an infinite anguish growing and growing, but never quite managing to overflow. Nobody bats an eyelid, and that’s when you start thinking you’re really losing your mind.
One Wednesday, the urge to start shouting became unbearable. I was in a metro car, riding a Saint-Michel-bound train. What stopped me, or saved me, was looking up and finding a phrase somebody had scrawled on one of the doors:
Parlez vos voisin!
The person who wrote it must have been either a sage or someone who’d been driven to despair. Or both.
I looked to my right and saw a man, a handsome blue-eyed Caucasian, somewhere in his fifties and smartly dressed. He was busy on his cell phone. I checked the graffiti again to make sure I’d understood what was undoubtedly fate stepping in to give me an order: “Talk to thy neighbor!”
I got ready to use a phrase in my rudimentary French, one of the formules de politesse we’d learned in class.
But when I turned to face the man, I couldn’t speak. He was still looking at his cell, only now his free hand was engaged in a very specific, and quite horrifying, activity.
Nobody else in the car seemed to have noticed.
I watched with a mixture of disgust and fascination. The man was picking his nose with his middle finger, which then traveled directly to his mouth. At times he left it resting on his tongue. Or he let the residue get stuck on one of his front teeth. You could see from his expression that he liked the taste. And he went on doing it.
He got off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. And I, just as the doors were about to slide shut, followed him off the train.
Coming out of the station, I saw the man walking ahead toward the corner where the Deux Magots café was. I followed him at a distance and he soon stepped inside the L’Écume des Pages bookstore. I went in after him and pretended to take a look at the new arrivals table. He went all the way to the back. He returned carrying a squat-looking book; it was thick, but the cover can’t have been larger than half a sheet of paper. I couldn’t see the title or the name of the author. The man paid and went out. I waited for a few seconds before following him. I saw him cross the boulevard, heading south. The walk sign on the pedestrian crossing came on again, and taking long, loping strides, I gained on him as he started down Rue Bonaparte.
The man was moving very quickly, and I lost sight of him. Moments later, the narrow sidewalks gave way to the wide-open space of Place Saint-Sulpice, with its fountain out in the middle and the majestic church at the far end. These were names and coordinates I would come to learn later on. For now it was only a case of spotting him going up the church steps, and then hurrying after him without asking myself where we were.
When I went through the church door, I was immediately struck by the deep beauty of the interior, like that of a pool of water suspended high above. Though I didn’t know why, I experienced a profound sensation of guilt. It was as though the Gothic concavity of the nave had been flipped over and had pierced my sternum.
I caught sight of the man. He was kneeling on a prie-dieu in front of a priest. They were on the other side of a glass screen that separated them from the aisle.
It took me a few moments to understand that what I was seeing—which looked more like a bank manager’s office than anything else—was the confessional.
Still keeping my distance, I went along the aisle.
I spent a short time looking at the main altar in the central nave, the lateral staircases, and all the screens and ornamentation. I went around the back of the altar, which brought me to another aisle, and it was then that I found myself at the Lady Chapel.
I sat on one of the small chairs arranged around it.
The statue of Mary is framed by marble columns. She appears with a baby boy in her arms, and she’s crushing a serpent underfoot. She stands on an orb representing planet Earth; the serpent is trapped between this and her foot. The orb, in turn, half protrudes from a stream of molten lava that threatens to spill over the edges of the frame. Yet it doesn’t. It’s as though Mary, via the weight of her immaculate foot, immobilizes the serpent and at the same time turns everything around her to stone, thereby stemming the evil that wants to devour the world.
That image gave me strength, but at the same time it troubled me. The thought I had was this: What happens if Mary lifts her foot?
I forgot about the man. I lowered my head, said a prayer under my breath, and started to cry.
As for the man I had seen, who turned out to be named Bogdan, I saw him again a fortnight later, again inside the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Later on I found out that, while I had been going back there evening after evening hoping to catch sight of him once more, he’d been going to different churches. Churches, as I would also find out, were one of his two great passions. The other one being zombies. Everything to do with zombies.
In the churches, Bogdan confessed. He wasn’t a Catholic, and though he felt guilt for certain things in his life, it didn’t weigh that heavily on him. He was Romanian but had lived much of his life in West Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet bloc, he went back to Romania and there became a pioneer in the world of financial services. He made a lot of money, and three children and two grandchildren arrived along the way. He’d put off enjoying his success and made many sacrifices, and just when it was coming time to retire, time for him to enjoy his life alongside his beloved wife, she died.
Now, more than a year after her death, he felt it was his duty to try to be happy, and that he had a license to do whatever he wanted.
As well as Romanian, Bogdan knew English, Russian, and German. But he’d always wanted to learn French, hence his decision to spend a year in Paris. He was taking an online course and, after every lesson, would go out and try to practice. The issue, unforeseen by him—it’s something no language institute or embassy will ever tell you—was the reticence of the Parisians.
And that was the challenge he had been facing when, visiting one of the city’s many churches one day, he happened upon the solution. Stepping inside the confessional was the perfect opportunity to practice his French, given the fact that the priest had no choice but to listen to him. And, unlike psychotherapy, it was free.
Now that they had gotten to know him, his confessors had even started correcting his vocab and pronunciation.
“And I’ve improved quite a lot,” Bogdan said. “You should try it someday.”
We were having our first beer together in the Café de la Mairie, across from Place Saint-Sulpice.
So as not to raise suspicions, Bogdan avoided going to the same church more than once a fortnight. He told each of the priests a different story. Or, rather, variations on or offshoots from one single ongoing story. To avoid confusion, he had a notebook to which he consigned what he said each time, along with the basic coordinates: priest’s name, church, time of confession, and penance.
“And where do you get your stories from?” I asked.
“From my novels,” he said.
In this new life of his, Bogdan had decided to fulfill another of his ambitions: to become a writer. The novels, or what he understood as such, would be based on his own life. An anodyne existence interrupted, when least expected, by something staggering: a zombie attack.
“Obviously, I never talk about zombies when I’m confessing. But I do manage to get across the sense that my life’s in danger. And so I’ve also come to see that this is precisely what a good novel is: a zombie attack always being imminent, but never actually happening.”
At that moment, Bogdan was working on a novel set in present-day Paris, which had its customary joie de vivre on show but was also riddled with the fear of terrorism. More than ever, this was a Paris under the long shadow of the city’s first bishop, Saint Denis, whom Bogdan furthermore considered the first zombie of the Christian era.
I don’t know whether Bogdan finished his novel. In fact, I don’t know for certain that he ever wrote a single page of it. But he did show me the stained-glass window in Saint-Sulpice’s with the terrible image of the decapitated saint hugging his own head to his chest. On another occasion, he showed me the inlaid statue at Notre-Dame Cathedral that repeats the same motif, as well as the one in Suzanne-Buisson. I went with him to Rue de Mont-Cenis and walked the three miles that, according to legend, Saint Denis walked holding his severed, bleeding head in his hands, before collapsing in the place where they would go on to build the great basilica that now bears his name. And where, additionally, the remains of all the French monarchs are buried, from Clovis I to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the two last true monarchs of France who—as I ought to know very well, Bogdan said—were also beheaded.
Bogdan’s explorations weren’t limited to Paris. He went to see churches in all corners of France. I was never asked to join him. He’d sometimes take off with no notice for two days or an entire week at a time.
I would become desperate.
To begin with, as a way to calm myself down or simply to fill the time, I gave his advice a go. I went to Saint-Sulpice’s, and to Saint-Séverin’s as well, and confessed. I adapted the story of Sommerville and Burroughs: Bogdan was a Moroccan poet and recovering alcoholic; I, on the other hand, remained a Latin American computer scientist working in linguistics. Instead of the infamous Dreamachine, he and I were working together on the “Kremlin-Bicêtre project.” When I tried to explain how the software worked, the priests started looking at me like I was from outer space. And at that point I dropped the whole masquerade.
Mme Rachou unwittingly gave me the name for the project. It was a day when the urges to start shouting were very strong. I remembered the underground mantra, parlez vos voisin, and went and knocked on her door. Mme Rachou, as well as being my landlady, also lived right next door.
“Oh, yes,” she said when I brought up the subject. “We have a long history of mad people in France.”
I’d told her how struck I was by the number of disturbed people in the city. And particularly on the metro.
Apropos of that, she explained the story of the name, or at least part of the name, of the neighborhood we were in. If you went up Avenue Général Leclerc you came to the Bicêtre Hospital, one of the oldest and most historically significant asiles des aliénés, which at other times had been a prison—it was there that Louis XVI said that the vagabonds and mendicants of Paris ought to be locked up.
“And what about the ‘Kremlin’ part?” I said.
“Oh . . . je sais pas,” she said.
The information I’ve just given is provided on a panel outside the hospital, alongside a map of the building. However, the fact I found most striking was the following: it had been there, in Bicêtre, on April 17, 1792, that the guillotine was first trialed.
I immediately thought about what Bogdan would say when I told him this new fact I’d learned. Then his continual rebuffs came to mind, and I decided I wouldn’t tell him anything.
That which I spitefully kept to myself in his absence, later evaporated completely. My interest in Paris’s psychiatric hospitals was the only proof of an incipient interior life that, the moment he came calling, I instantly forsook.
That life, nonetheless, gradually came to transform my doctoral mission.
One morning I found a book entitled Le Kremlin-Bicêtre: identité d’une ville, by M. L. Fernández, in the university library. Its author explains the origins of that ville’s name by first explaining that the Bicêtre Hospital harked back, via some mangled pronunciation, to the Bishop of Winchester, Jean de Pontoise, who had been awarded the land in that area in 1286. The “Kremlin” part, on the other hand, was part of a great business strategy. In 1812, on the return of Napoleon’s devastated army after the Russia campaign, large numbers of the veterans took refuge in the hospital. As a way of attracting this clientele, a local tavern owner with a nose for business had the idea of opening a bar named Au Sergent du Kremlin, and in time, with the bar’s rise in popularity, the name ended up extending to that whole outlying area of the city.
Other pieces of information emerged over the course of those months. Connections that would briefly illuminate a system of signs otherwise enveloped in fog.
The problem was Bogdan.
But what interest could that presentiment of mine hold when Bogdan showed up at my apartment and, without so much as asking if I wanted to, took me salsa dancing in a place overlooking the Seine on the Quai Saint-Bernard. How was I going to solve the algorithm France had become if he, after we’d been dancing, asked me up to the terrace of the Arab World Institute for a drink, thereby, with that view over Paris in the spring, deactivating all my fears?
Then, one day in May, Bogdan announced that he was leaving. He wanted to spend a couple of months looking at churches in the north of France, and from there move on to Belgium.
I didn’t want to say goodbye. Nor did he insist. I shut myself in my apartment and cried for a week. Then I came back to earth. I felt completely empty, ready to think.
Mme Rachou thought I’d been away on a trip.
“You look very pale, young man. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, Mme Rachou. Nothing to worry about.”
“Your friend, the Russian, left this,” she said, handing me a package.
Opening it, I recognized the squat book. It turned out to be a copy of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
“He isn’t Russian,” I said.
Mme Rachou’s answer pulled the rug from under me completely:
“Of course he’s Russian.” She smiled as though to forgive my naïveté.
I took the book with me to the university that day.
He hadn’t written any dedication. There were only some underlined phrases in the introduction relating to Gothic architecture in churches and the many restorations undergone by Notre-Dame.
What did it all mean? Maybe he’d known from the beginning about me following him? What had Mme Rachou meant by her answer?
I started to investigate. I soon established some of the historical context, which at the same time would help my argument should anyone ever decide to put any money behind the project. As I continued to read around, I was able to home in on what I was really trying to find—for example, when I came across talk of the Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse psychiatric hospital, which had wings for mentally ill people set out according to the revolutionary calendar, I knew I was starting to see what was really in play here.
When I read the news about the attack in Nice, during the Bastille Day celebrations, Bogdan immediately came to mind. I don’t know why, given he’d said he was heading north, not south. I spent a number of days poring over everything that emerged to do with the attack: articles, reports, videos, the statements of the people who had been present.
Before July was out, there was the attack on the Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. I had hardly so much as read the headline and I already knew, this time beyond question, that Bogdan was involved. Not only because that church was in northern France, or because of the two terrorists’ horrifying decision to slit the priest’s throat, but because of the two nuns and two parishioners who had been inside the church at the time and were taken hostage. One parishioner was French, and the other was Russian.
There were no photos of the sacrifice that took place, nor did the names of the hostages who had witnessed it appear. But such proof was beside the point. Now all I wanted to know was Bogdan’s connection to everything that was going on. Did the attacks have anything to do with him? Or was it all confirmation that, in spite of his hoax confessions, he was actually in danger? Or, the strangest possibility of all, had Bogdan worked out some way of anticipating the attacks? His confessions, the supposed zombie attacks—were these not coded references to terrorist activities?
Anxiety began to boil up inside me, and this time it seemed like the lava would overflow. But then I remembered that I had the book.
­I went and found it and started going through it again. Something told me to check that Bogdan hadn’t hidden a piece of paper somewhere between its pages. Doing this, I happened upon a number of paragraphs he’d underlined in the lengthy Notes section contained in that edition. Specifically, the second and fifth notes to page 68, which, following on from the also-lengthy introduction, corresponded with the second page of chapter one.
These two notes made reference to the fête des fous, or Feast of Fools, a remnant of the Roman Saturnalian festival celebrated by the clergy during the Middle Ages. The activities that made up this carnival, in which a false bishop, archbishop, and even pope (un pope des fous) would be elected, were taken on by the wider populace, and in particular young écoliers, leading on several occasions to brawls and disturbances, imprisonments, and the whole event being outlawed.
The notes also mentioned a book called Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, by Henry Sauval, which Victor Hugo himself had made liberal use of in the construction of his cathedral.
The interesting part, at least for Bogdan, who made a note in the margin, wasn’t only the evident relationship between these “clerics” (in the medieval sense of the word, as revived by Julien Benda in his famous book) and the makers of the Enlightenment encyclopedias, but also the fact that Hugo’s and Sauval’s dates didn’t match up.
Sauval had the feast happening on the day after Twelfth Night: January 7, that is. Whereas Hugo had the two celebrations on the same date: January 6—the day the novel begins. Was Twelfth Night, associated in continental Europe primarily with the Three Kings, the same as the Feast of Fools? Did this constitute backhanded criticism of the Restoration? Veiled support for the Revolution of 1830, which was already beginning to raise its head and in fact exploded into life on July 27, only two days after Hugo started work on the novel?
I initially took the comparison to be Hugo’s way of casting aspersions on the monarchy. But, looking at it again, a more profound interpretation was suggested: when the powerful have their feasts, it’s just mad people and abject drunks having a high time. What else could Bogdan have meant by the emphasis he’d placed on Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette having been France’s “last true monarchs”? Wasn’t this ultimately the same mistrust as Hugo’s for any form of “restoration”?
There were too many questions. So many, in fact, that I only managed to work out—through an instinct I’d thought completely extinguished in myself—where the answers were certain not to be. And that was in the outward, surface-level Paris, lovely to a fault, where the calculated staying power of its architecture has combined with the tourism industry to turn the past into a single, undifferentiated weft.
It was in the subterranean city that I would have to go looking for Bogdan.
I’ve learned a great many surprising things, living in the Paris metro these years. The first being that the Kremlin-Bicêtre project was already a reality a long time ago. Some of my companions, when they’re in high spirits, or rather when the booze takes them to the brink of delirium, go so far as to say that it’s always existed. Under other names, and taking different routes, but always coming out in this place that is both origin and spillway.
The second is that Parisians, to a one, confess. You only need to look at them from the platform, going around in those glass-sided booths, so reticent, so unforthcoming, while at the same time saying—shouting, at times—so much.
The third is that Russian is a beautiful language, which when mixed together with French, alcohol, and the cold, becomes something prophetic.
What we have done down here is to prefigure that which, sooner or later, will end up happening up above. The victory of the Front National, for example, was predicted by one of the Saint-Lazare station’s cells (which is one of the oldest), long before Le Pen Sr. came on the scene.
France imploding is another recurrent topic of conversation, one that only we—Russians or French, it doesn’t matter anymore—link back to its original cause: the nostalgia we felt for our fleeting empires (and even the Revolution), and for the hell we failed to unleash. The older guys always end up telling the stories of the disaster that was the Russia campaign. The incomprehensible loss of life which seemed to punish, rather than to reward, the advance. The promise of entering Moscow, only to find the city absurdly empty, razed to the ground by the Russian army itself.
We are the only ones capable of understanding that a young French person has it within them to point a machine gun at their classmates, or at the people in the café where their parents used to go, and, with a cry of “Allah is great” or “Death to all immigrants,” open fire. It’s in those moments that we accept the truth of the matter: other people ought to be apprised of these things. Which means that the project, and completing it with somebody from outside, remains as pressing as ever.
I nonetheless feel that I am the only one who understands the true importance of the interface. I am occasionally surprised to find myself sitting alone in the Kremlin Tavern, at the table at the back, arguing. But it doesn’t stop me.
This is the reason I still go out.
I go to Saint-Sulpice’s to look at Mary’s immaculate foot and see how long we have left.
Then I get on one of the metro trains, taking up position between the confessionals. If someone is careless enough to come and sit next to me, I start picking my nose. And if not, I just read the writing on the doors, the seatbacks, and the walls, looking for the hidden truths, just as the saints, the mad people, and the lovers of Paris do.

Rodrigo Blanco Calerón has received awards for his stories both inside and outside Venezuela. In 2007 he was invited to join the Bogotá39 group, which brings together the best Latin American writers under forty years old. In 2014 his story “Emuntorios” was included in Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America, issue 46 of McSweeneys. With his first novel, The Night, he won the 2016 Paris Rive Gauche Prize, the Critics Award in Venezuela, and the 2019 Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Prize.

Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Agustín Fernández Mallo, María Gainza, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and has twice won a PEN Translates award. His own writing has appeared in publications such as Brixton Review of Books, LitHub, and The Paris Review. He is currently a Royal Literary Fellow, teaching at Swansea University.

“The Mad People of Paris” appears in Sacrifices: Stories, to be published in September by Seven Stories Press.

Illustration: Calum Heath