Like the locals, we lounge a lot in the parks. The chairs scattered around ask to be lingered on, they are olive or mustard coloured, and either upright or slightly tilted back.
We eat ice-creams in parks, bring our books. They are restful places, green and shaded. Other places to hang out are cafés, but cappuccinos are expensive – up to A$9. A similar drink without the froth, a ‘café crème’ is cheaper and more French, and I have that, but not every day. When I do, I linger over it in cafés near us, stringing one out for a few hours, watching the locals eat their buttered baguettes with coffee for breakfast. Like me, some have laptops, and more and more cafés have wifi. People still read books in cafés too. Parents bring their kids. Here we are with Sophie, a friend from school who we shared some glorious days with.
We are so fortunate. So many others are less so. Everywhere we go, there is a beggar every two hundred metres, on every street. In France, where the social security system is crippling the country, why are there still those who fall through the cracks? They are from all nationalities, male and female, young and old. I am reading George Orwell’s description of his struggling life in Paris and London, Down and Out in Paris and London. His poverty makes him sensitive to the plight of poor people, and he posits that beggars are doing a job and shouldn’t be feared or reviled. Their job is poorly remunerated and the hours relentlessly long, but it is no less worthwhile than some other occupations, and taxing enough to be labelled as ‘work.’
One beggar remains particularly vivid in my mind. An old, woman – she looked about eighty – dirt-dusted, her skin like paper, urine-smelly, asleep sitting up among piles of clothes, a sleeping bag, cardboard and tinned food, in the roofed entrance to a public building. What was her story, and how long had she been on the streets? How could she survive? Was she mentally ill? Had the security guard around the corner tried to help her? And how could I walk past and not do something about it, merely appeasing my conscience with a small donation for her cup?
It doesn’t seem much less pitiful than the beggars in a populated, developing country like India – a country that an acquaintance of mine said she could never visit because the poverty would be too confronting. I think of George Orwell’s observations in Down and Out, more than seventy years ago, when I see these beggars:
‘The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.’
Lucky me. No millionaire, but I am out and about, not down and out, in Paris.
