No. 05 | Stars in the Seine
I came to Paris to see shirtless firemen, but instead I saw stars burning in the Seine.
After a year of pandemic life, I find myself dearly missing random encounters, sweaty communion with strangers, and dancing until dawn. I miss trains, travel, and Paris. Above all, I miss my very dear friend Marcelo.
This is my cherished memory of the first time we met. It’s a long one, but I hope you enjoy the ride. Where else have we got to go, anyway?
—
It was spring, and I was in Paris to see choir friends from Manila who had come to sing at the Cathedrale Notre Dame. Any excuse was a good excuse to hop on the train to Paris for the weekend.
Arriving at the Gare du Nord with my backpack on my shoulders and time on my hands, I wanted to explore Paris with my camera. But this time, I didn’t want to visit my usual haunts. I wanted something new and different, something I hadn’t seen or done before.
As I often do, I turned to Instagram for inspiration, scrolling through the profiles of Paris-based photographers. On a whim, I decided to message five of them, introducing myself as an Instagrammer from Amsterdam. I loved their photos, I said, and by any chance would they be free for a cup of coffee and a stroll this afternoon?
No replies, except for a Brazilian photographer named Marcelo. I knew him only from the photos he had posted on Instagram. He had an eye for colorful murals and street scenes, and we had exchanged comments on each other’s photos in the past.
Welcome to Paris! He wrote. Yes! Let’s meet!
A black-bearded charcoal lightning bolt
Within an hour, Marcelo arrived up on a Velib in front of a supermarket on the Canal St. Martin, where we had agreed to meet.
He was a lightning bolt rendered in charcoal strokes: a thick shock of black hair that kept falling into his eyes, a full black beard, dressed head to toe in black—t-shirt, skinny jeans, army boots—with a black camera bag over his shoulder. Warmth and energy radiated from him, so intense the air around him was almost crackling with it.
After sitting down to dangle our feet over the canal, it quickly became clear that Marcelo didn’t speak much English. Oh no, how do I get out of this without seeming rude? was one of my first thoughts.
But he had just bought a 50mm lens for his Nikon before coming to meet me. His excitement about the new lens was infectious, even magnetic.
And there was something about the way his hazel eyes lit up when he recognized me, or how he greeted me with a quick and ready hug, as if we were old friends instead of meeting for the first time.
Soon we were stringing together bits of English, Portuguese, Spanish, and sign language into an animated chat that ended up lasting nearly six hours.
As we walked along the Canal St-Martin towards the Quai de la Loire, he pointed out a building where the firefighters of Paris studied and trained. In the summer, he said, the firemen threw a huge party, an all-night rager. Marcelo loved to party.
Indifferent to partying, I nodded politely until he added: “The pompiers of Paris are beautiful men. They take off the shirt, they party all night.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Did you say shirtless firemen?”
He laughed. “Oui!”
I booked a train ticket for a return trip to Paris three months later.
The night before I left Amsterdam to return to Paris, I received a message from Marcelo. He had mixed up his dates—and I had missed the firemen’s party!
“The pompiers have the party last week,” he said, apologizing. “But tomorrow have another party called Possession. Is very good party. Techno party. Very strong party.”
Curiosity made me click on the Facebook link he sent. The profile photo was of an open-mouthed nun clutching a black cross, her eyes bleeding black tears and rolling up white in her skull.
Yikes. Nothing could have been further from the sweaty, shirtless French firemen of my dreams.
I tried to decline. “Um, this isn’t really my scene,” I told him. But I’d already paid for my train tickets and my hotel room, and we both knew it.
“So it looks like I’m going to a techno party called Possession,” I told my husband the day I left for Paris. “I hate techno.”
He laughed, but quickly turned serious. “Stay safe, babe. Send me Marcelo’s last name and phone number please,” he said. “And have fun. I’ll see you on Monday.”
Concrete dreams in your mind’s eye
I arrived at the Quai de la Rapee before midnight. Stone steps led me below street level to the banks of the Seine, where Marcelo greeted me with a tight hug.
Smiling, he led me towards a massive barge that pounded with what sounded less like music than a battle between very large pieces of heavy machinery. I did not like the sound of it at all.
The barge turned out to be a club called Concrete, filled with pale French students dressed in black.
We were joined by Ananda, whom Marcelo had met through his extensive network of Brazilians in Paris. Young, skinny, with frizzy hair and a wide, metal-studded smile, Ananda was as warm and friendly as Marcelo. It was her first time in Europe and her last night in Paris; she was flying back to Brazil the next day.
For the first hour or so, the three of us wandered around Concrete as people slowly trickled in. I helped Marcelo put on black eyeliner; the effect on him was stunning.
Close to one in the morning, he decided it was time. “MD,” he said to me. “We talk this before?”
We had. Back when we had first met, it was Marcelo who had brought up MD, a pure form of the active ingredient in Ecstasy. I’d only heard of party drugs, but had never tried them.
My only experience with any kind of mind-altering substance had been when I moved to the Netherlands and lit my first joint. Having never learned how to smoke cigarettes, I ended up only coughing and getting sleepy, not high. I’d felt let down by my first brush with drugs, and decided that I wasn’t missing much.
I had asked Marcelo what it was like. “Everybody beautiful,” he said, closing his eyes, spreading his arms and lifting his face to the sky. “Have no problems. Love everybody.”
I was skeptical; it sounded hokey. But something about the bliss in his expression, his openness in that moment stayed with me, and I thought: Okay, I’m in.
He slipped something hard and conical into each of our hands. A swig of water, a hard swallow. The effect on Ananda was almost instantaneous: tossing her hair and winding her hips, the girl moved like a snake into the thick of the dancing.
Marcelo did not dance. What he did at parties was walk. He wove through the crowd continuously and seemed to know everyone. People were drawn to him, wanting to touch his beard or pull him close for a chat.
As I followed in his wake, I felt as if something was missing. It was Marcelo’s scene, but not mine; I didn’t find the music appealing at all. A beautiful young boy stopped to ask me what I was studying. I thought it was hilarious at first, but then I just felt old. What was I doing here?
With Ananda lost in the crowd, Marcelo and I moved to the side, leaning on the railing of the top deck overlooking the Seine. He asked me how I was doing.
“I don’t think this will have any effect on me,” I said. “I think I might just go home.”
The words had scarcely left my lips when everything went soft. Whoosh, like the world breathing out a sigh.
At that very moment, the city lights reflected on the Seine coalesced into giant four-pointed stars that blazed more brightly than anything I had ever seen. Fierce and dazzling in their brilliance, the stars on the river were so enormous, they almost looked cartoon-like.
“You feel something!” Marcelo said.
When I finally dared answer, it seemed like aeons later. “The lights—the lights,” I whispered. “They’re so beautiful.”
Marcelo embraced me; the most natural thing to do was embrace him back.
The Seine was on fire, and so was I.
Placing his hands on my shoulders, Marcelo urged me into the crowd. “Go, go, go!”
The music spoke to me, and I began to listen. The bass became a command, and I obeyed.
It began as a beating of a thousand hearts under the soles of my feet, bleeding into my veins from the ground up, gaining momentum as it pounded through me, coursing up my legs, my spine, my hips, my shoulders, bursting through the tips of my fingers as I threw my hands up in the air, every single muscle in my body animated by the relentless rhythm.
I piled my sweat-matted hair on top of my head with one hand. Behind me, Marcelo leaned in close and blew lightly across my nape. Each of the tiny hairs on the back of my neck became palm trees caught in a humid breeze, swaying in the prelude to a tropical storm.
His hands settled over my shoulders, giving them a quick tight squeeze. Heat radiated from his palms deep into my shoulders, pulling me deep into a warm bath.
I closed my eyes and let myself sink deeper into the soup of sights, sounds and sensations. I could have stayed in one spot all night taking it all in.
But Marcelo was too restless. “I need walk,” he said. “Walk, talk, people. I need this.”
I said I would come with him. “Walk,” he told me. “Talk to every people. Look all in the eyes.”
And I did.
For the first time, I realized how much I had always shunned eye contact, how I shut out strangers by never looking them in the eye. Maybe I had been protecting myself. Maybe I had been afraid of what I would see. But now I was ready. My eyes were open. And I wanted to see everything.
I wanted to remember it all—how colors melted together the way you would mix watercolors by shifting paper while it was still wet, the paint flowing and sliding together into new hues.
How sound penetrated every available texture, every hidden corner, until the shadows themselves seemed to pulsate with life.
How light captivated me: the glint of the strobe light dancing on a silver earring, the slick sheen of sweat covering every exposed inch of skin.
I had never seen any of these people before in my life, but I felt that I knew them all, and that they knew me. A stranger brushed my arm with the glowing tip of a lit cigarette, but I barely noticed.
I brought out a small folding fan from my purse and fanned the dancers around me. They leaned closer, sighing with pleasure and relief at the cool breeze. I lent the fan to a girl who squeezed my face with her hands when she gave it back, saying Merci, jolie, with a soft kiss on my cheek.
Lost in the pounding music, my mind was completely quiet. My thoughts disappeared to make space for the enormous rush of new stimuli. I had never realized how loud the roar in my head had been until it had been shut off.
For the first time, in the midst of a writhing crowd, I knew what it was like to be absolutely at peace with myself.
Dawn broke over the Seine, turning the dark waters rosy gold, when I decided to return to my hotel room. I found Marcelo with a group of Brazilians and told him I was leaving. He gave me a fierce, tight hug, which I returned. Then he took my face in both of his hands and kissed me on the lips.
At that moment, I was incapable of guessing, analyzing, or overthinking what this meant. I simply accepted it for what it was: a definitive end to a night like no other.
A year later, Marcelo sent me a photo from the very spot where we had stood. In the fuzzy smartphone photo, there were no larger-than-life cartoon supernovas, only distant echoes of digital noise . The flat, burned-out pixels transmitted none of the afterglow of that one incandescent night.
But the stars had set something alight in me that night: a spark that now, alive and burning, would never go out.
“Always when I come, I stop here and I remember you. Always,” he wrote. “Good night, ma cherie. Come here in your dreams.”
—
Thank you so much for joining me on a midnight adventure in Paris.
Concrete closed in the summer of 2019, but you can still find Marcelo on Instagram.
As always, I love reading your thoughts, ideas, and burning questions, so write me! Has an encounter with a random stranger changed your life? Please tell me about it. I am dying to know.
If you like what you read, please share it with someone. Especially if it’s someone who misses Paris or dancing, like I do.
I am working up the courage to tell you about my first book. I’m finding it more difficult than I thought to be vulnerable. But I’m getting there.
Perhaps the next letter will be the one. See you in two weeks!
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What a beautiful story about being in the moment - about courage - about overcoming yourself and all you think you are & know... And yes I do have a story ;-) might just write it down one day thanks to you Deepa - you are truly a source of inspiration - in many ways...