Precarious Lease (eBook)

Jacqueline Feldman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
312 Seiten
Fitzcarraldo Editions (Verlag)
978-1-80427-141-4 (ISBN)

Infos

In her extraordinary non-fiction debut, Jacqueline Feldman tells the story of Le Bloc, a legendary squat situated at the far edge of Paris, near where the banlieue begins. Opened in 2012, the squat took in artists and activists as well as immigrants from around the world. They lived and worked within its labyrinthine structure, continually threatened with eviction and existential as well as financial precarity. Over many years Feldman, a reporter from the US, follows a cast of itinerant, displaced characters, tracing the fate of a counterculture under austerity while investigating the trending use of a legal device by which squatters could receive a reprieve from eviction but were reduced in status to property guardians. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin and other chroniclers of Paris, she draws on its revolutionary and bohemian history while sounding issues of the most contemporary urgency about hospitality and refuge, creativity and precarity, ecology and utopia. With gripping candour and journalistic precision, Precarious Lease is a thrilling dramatization of late-stage possibilities for co-existence in the ruins of a capital city.

Jacqueline Feldman was the recipient of a Fulbright grant for her reporting in Paris, where she lived for years. An Albertine Translation Laureate for her previous book, On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, which features her translation of a story by Nathalie Quintane, and a graduate of the EHESS-Paris, she teaches expository writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Autor

Jacqueline Feldman was the recipient of a Fulbright grant for her reporting in Paris, where she lived for many years. An Albertine Translation Laureate for her previous book, On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, which features her translation of a story by Nathalie Quintane, and a graduate of the EHESS-Paris, she teaches expository writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her essays have appeared in Triple Canopy, The White Review and the Paris Review.

Textauszug

¶ I could write about a man who considered his integrity to consist, if not principally then partially, in the repetition of stock phrases. Knowing they got old, Le Général slipped them in as subordinate clauses—comme je vais toujours bien jamais mal—as jokes, jokes for me. Alongside a recto and verso of schoolboy cursive he’d left himself no margin. For an instant it looked as if he’d written on the envelope itself, though he had not, and momentarily I regretted that I hadn’t also sent paper.

Le 27 octobre 2018. Formally dated, with that period after, and located: Rouen. Ma chère Jacqueline.

What a magnificent moment, to receive your letter, thank you Jacqueline, for having taken a few moments to write me; it gives me pleasure to have some news of you and of the advancement of your book project; as for me I’m off on yet another adventure, that of prison and of the deprivation of liberty, but as I’m always good, never bad, and as normality of life for me is really different from that for the vast majority of French people, a typical day, understanding that I’ve since met half of those interned here, wake up in the mornings at 7 or 7:30, it’s trash pick up and mail at first whether external or internal (cultural services, medical services, any request), one walk a day in the open air, for me the walk is from 12:45 to 1:15 (the only moment when I have access to one of three phone booths [send me a French number and I’ll try to call you, the administration will without a doubt call you to confirm]); as I’m taking care of a sick detainee I leave my cell relatively regularly, I accompany him in all his moves; I’m already familiar with three-quarters of the surveillance and external personnel, a library (I go fairly regularly [three times a week]), a “philosophy coffee” activity, but that’s already been postponed twice so what else to tell you, that normally I should receive a prize from the Malraux Foundation, new contacts at the Mayor of Paris, a project of creating a cryptocurrency…

With these few words I leave you in pen but not in heart, hoping to read of you soon: take care.

An elegant close, I thought. He prided himself on his French. He signed off, then, as “Le Général,” with a big, sweeping X, having added a more modest X above his writing’s every i.

I didn’t know what he was in for. I had last seen him in Nîmes, a city on the Mediterranean, in 2016, August, breezy but hot.

I could write about him that day: two hours late, owing to a headache. He blamed it on the chlorine of a pool he had been using, which was, he said, beautiful. He was really unwell. He lay on a bench, and I sat at its head. The major sound was that of buses circumnavigating an esplanade now and again, like a weather event. From a distance I heard children laughing, echoes of a fountain: we might have been sunbathing at the end of the world.

Or so I noted down. Le Général was in camo gear, his usual. The soles of his sandals were peeling. His physical deterioration was subtle enough that I couldn’t ask about it directly, or felt I could not. A few front teeth had been, as I remembered, missing. Now more were gone, leaving the constants: motile brown eyes, a round face, short salt-and-pepper hair. Olive-skinned, he was of Portuguese extraction, for people of his parents’ generation in France a non-white racial category. My height, a little fat. Short of breath. In better health he’d sit flush with a chair’s back to lean forward nimbly, claiming territory.

“Even as I speak with you, I see you this way,” he said, making a gesture of parallax with both hands to show how there were two of me. On a forearm were scratches, raw. He was speaking of a chicken farm in Haiti, an ambition. “The next step is to go there in person and be energetically, financially, digitally independent.” He pulled a bankcard from a pocket, given to him “for business.” He did not say by whom. Neither would he reveal the source of a second windfall, the use of a villa where he professed to be staying. He lay back and tugged off his cap, sunglasses. His eyes were squeezed shut, sockets pink with fatigue. He draped his arms over his face. Silence. A fly landed in an armpit and crawled a moment before moving along. I had offered to take an earlier train to Paris, where I was staying with friends. He had rejected the idea. I offered to take us to lunch, out of the heat. I was impatient. I’d come all this way, come from New York. It was as if my listening was something not quite freely given, irrecoverable even as I was the one who required of myself to find out what had happened to Le Général. I prompted him, starting the tape. I chose the humiliation of taking him seriously as he was wasting my time. He sat up, swigged from a water bottle that I had brought, and sighed. Behind him, a man coaxed a dog to its hind legs. It drank from a fountain. “Everything I can tell you about Le Bloc I’ve already told you,” Le Général said. At Le Bloc he had been “in [his] element.”

Born Antonio Joaquín Xavier in a Portuguese coastal village, a suburb of Porto, 1969, the baby was quickly relocated to a bad suburb of Rouen, France, where he attracted disaster. On an early birthday, bathwater scalded half of his body. As a man he’d boast about the accident, showing off scars lingering along one foot. A slippery toddler, a child who disappeared, he fell, sleeping soundly, between bed and wall. The search took his mother an hour. At twelve months he vanished among market stalls to reappear adopted, playing with a pack of dogs. His stepfather would mount alarms. The boy tampered with them, a burgeoning electrician, and escaped into the night. A prodigy, he ate two sandwiches daily so his mother would allow him out to buy bread. He read comic books before he could read, decrypting the pictures. When he couldn’t buy a new release, he stole it. By five he had built up a skill set. He credited his criminal imagination to the luck by which he’d grown up in a shoddy residential tower, public housing called an HLM. The world was unfair to him, fair game. His stepfather didn’t like to catch him wandering. “So I had to find a solution,” the debutant realized, “and fast.” He got to know the library. He crossed a forest and came upon another suburb. He went swimming in the water tower. In the first squat he opened, in Rouen proper, a hallway trailed from the front door to a desk, where the young man sat and watched pedestrians who never caught him looking. The feeling was one of achievement. He developed expertise as a locksmith, this by now proficient electrician, all of which he would draw on in opening additional buildings. He issued checks, he said, from a bank of his own invention, for which he would claim to have served only part of a sentence. “There was an error,” he clarified. “So I was set free.” All grown up, he turned his attention to auto theft. Every unsavory enterprise compelled him. An aging thief when I met him, he had failed as a murderer. “I had to understand why I lived in an HLM while others lived in little houses with gardens,” he said. “I left like Tom Sawyer, to discover the world.”

Throughout France he was called, in his travels, Mr. X, until while sleeping on the plaza at La Défense, the Paris-area business district where activists had taken up a protest against austerity, he met Stéphane Hessel, a figurehead of the French Left. Actually he met Hessel in Montreuil. Hessel dubbed him Le Général. Le Général would never know why—but, as he told me ingenuously, it stuck. It stuck in Paris. In Portugal, he went by Joaquín. In Monaco, he was known as Tony.

Call him what you like, I am writing of him as he spoke of himself. “I’m not an innocent man, Jacqueline,” he’d say, only to explain it with another favorite: “I live inside the margin of the margin of society.” He had been kicked out of Monaco, having gambled injudiciously. Sixteen times, he had had to flee Italy. In Paris, he met a man I’ll call Caravaggio, a name you won’t forget is made up. Born somewhere, one parent or neither Moroccan, Caravaggio, unlike Le Général, was accustomed to the Paris suburbs. He explained his métier of squatting with an opportunism that was no cause for shame. He was in prison when he saw a squat depicted on TV. There’s something I can do when I get out, he thought. It appealed to him more than any livelihood for which his experience might have qualified him. In squatting, one did not risk serving time, and he had wanted anyway to pivot. He needed a place to live.

These men made themselves useful to each other. In the highest style they maintained a squat in the neighborhood of the Place de la République remarkable not only for the centrality of its location, but for the paintings that came, under their management, to decorate its considerable façade, courtesy of the graffiti artist Kouka: tribal warriors, wielding spears, a leggy Quixote on every oblong window. Le Général subsequently opened a squat in an eastern suburb and dubbed it Mirabeau, work he thought of as a service...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.1.2025
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Banlieue • Bohemian history • Counterculture • France • Joan Didion • le bloc • Paris • Reportage • Squat • squatters rights • true accounts • Walter Benjamin
• ISBN-10: 1-80427-141-1 / 1804271411
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80427-141-4 / 9781804271414