The Woman in Beige

Anyone who has spent much time in a big city knows that sooner or later you see everything. Paris is no exception.

                  Over the years, I have seen my share of curious and inexplicable sights, all the imaginable and sometimes unimaginable things that happen in the streets.

                  I remember in particular, from a good number of years ago, the rat man of the Latin Quarter, for example. He entertained the queues of people lining up for the cinemas on the boulevard Saint-Germain. He looked like a street person, though he might just as easily have lived in a penthouse apartment in Neuilly and merely dressed the part. I think he rather cultivated his image. He definitely looked louche, and he strolled around with a pet rat. He would walk up and down the lines, letting people see his rat run up and down his arms, in and out of his tatty blue cloth jacket.

                  It wasn't a real rat, of course. I think it was just plastic or something, but he made it move convincingly. He had mastered the art of letting people see just enough and no more, and he used the illusion combined with the element of surprise to good effect.

                  Regulars knew him, and they knew what they were in for. He would saunter about, letting people glimpse his rat while he assessed the crowd. He always smiled good-naturedly and took care not to seem threatening, merely simple and a little foolish. Then he would identify someone in line to move in on, his mark as it were. It would be someone who had reacted to the rat with fear or nervousness, someone who hadn't figured out that it was fake (perhaps precisely because their unease made them not look too closely). He'd approach the person, keeping the rat close to his chest, under control, so that at first the mark wasn't alarmed. The person might recoil slightly, but since the man seemed pretty harmless (he never panhandled), it would have seemed like an overreaction to do more than that. The onlookers didn't do anything either. If they knew how the game worked, they knew there was no real danger, it was all a joke, one at someone else's expense, no need to intervene, especially if they wanted to enjoy the payoff. The calmness of the crowd made it even more likely that the mark wouldn't react strongly. The atmosphere thus remained quietly good-natured. To have protested would have been to blow things out of proportion.

                  Once the rat man was within "striking" range, he would lunge at the mark as though the rat had suddenly escaped his control and was going to run up the arm of the victim. The rat man never stopped smiling genially and of course he would grab the rat and restrain it just in time, but not before the mark had had a nasty shock and jumped back in alarm, perhaps with a shriek or a scream. And the crowd would laugh, and then the tension would evaporate, and the mark would feel silly, and the rat man would move on and the whole act would start over again further down the boulevard with a new set of innocent or not-so-innocent participants.

                  I don't recall the rat man ever passing the hat after one of these performances. Maybe he did, I really don't remember, but what stays with me is the mischievous, though not mean-spirited, enjoyment he took in the performance. I remember him as doing it for the fun. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but that's how I remember it.

                  The rat man was far from the strangest thing I ever saw, though. That title has to go to an unusual and I think, in retrospect, touching incident I observed a short time ago.

                  I was back in my old neighborhood in Montmartre having been away from Paris for a good number of years on account of the plague.

                  There was a café near the Métro stop where I often used to enjoy a late-afternoon apéritif on the terrace on my way home. The neighborhood was much changed on this occasion, but I decided to stop for a refreshment for old times' sake as much as anything. It had been a great spot for people watching in the past, and it still was, but the crowd seemed thinner and sadder somehow. The beautiful Hector Guimard art nouveau Métro entrance was covered up with scaffolding, and while this heralded perhaps some sparkling feat of restoration (not that the green ironwork had seemed to need it, as I recalled), the effect was more to suggest some imminent collapse, a reflection of the general crumbling away that was going on all around in the social fabric. It seemed that many businesses had closed. The delightful bakery a few doors away was shuttered, for example, and it really seemed like nothing was quite the same.

                  Even the garish merry-go-round next to the Métro entrance had lost its glitz. It used to have brightly-colored, faux-gamin style illustrations on the panels all around it, enhanced by bright, glaring, flashing lights. Shaggy-haired boys with big eyes and sad faces competed for attention with bashful girls, the whole thing a riot of eye-popping colors so ugly it was somehow irresistibly breath-taking.

                  Now, while all the rides on the roundabout were as garish as ever—a pink Cinderella carriage, a neon green rocket, a blue helicopter, a banana-yellow motor bike—all the panels around the rides were a bland, blank cream color. The roundabout was still functioning, offering rides to indifferent kids who, in training to be future consumers, made a dive for whatever confection-colored  mode of transportation they felt drawn to in that moment, but it was as though something was missing.

                  I was observing the crowd idly from the terrace of the café when my attention was caught by a woman standing beside the merry-go-round. In the middle of so much bustle and commotion, her stillness stood out. I found myself studying her.

                  She was watching the roundabout. At first my eye simply passed over her as it roved around the crowd, but each time I returned to her, it seemed as though she hadn't moved a muscle since the last time I looked her way. She stared with expressionless fixity. I found myself returning again and again to her, until eventually I was watching only her and ignoring the rest of the crowd.

                  I noticed that although she seemed to be standing stock still, her eyes were in constant motion. She appeared to be following the motion of one of the rides, round and around, but stare as I might, I couldn't decide who she was looking at. I didn't think too much about it at first.

                  The woman herself was a veritable study in beige. From head to toe, everything about her was a neutral shade. Physically, her light-brown hair blended into her unremarkable complexion. She wore a light beige raincoat. It wasn't raining but it was a cool early-summer day, "frais" if one were in the shade, with a light breeze, and one could be forgiven for thinking that rain wasn't out of the question. She wore a bland shade of hose, with beige non-descript shoes. Nothing about her drew attention to itself.

                  As I watched her, her arms hung at her sides while her glance went round and round in time with the circuits of the merry-go-round: slowly to the right at the platform rotated, then suddenly to the left when suddenly whoever she was looking at disappeared and she waited for the moment when they would re-appear from behind the central pillar. I observed the cycle several times, up to the point where the roundabout stopped its gyrations.

                  That ride was over. Children clambered off their chosen transports--motor boats, fire engines, unicorns—and returned to their parents or minders. One of the ride operators circulated, a half-smoked cigarette stuck to his lips, checking that all the children were dis-mounting, that no one was trying to sneak a second ride for free. I looked over at the woman in beige, she made a slight movement with one hand, raising it in what looked like a gesture of "stop, stay there," as though reassuring a child that another go-round had been paid for and was expected. But I couldn't see who she was looking at. Maybe the person was just out of my sight line. I didn't really give it another thought, and soon the roundabout commenced its slow rotation, gradually picking up speed until it was in full swing. Once again, the beige woman's eyes followed the circuits, and once again I struggled to see who she was with, and gave up.

                  This time, though, when the ride came to an end, there was no "stay there." Her eyes followed a path from the now stationary platform to a place at her side. I saw her bend down for a moment, as though addressing a child standing next to her, and I saw her lips move. A moment later her hand moved, too. Instead of hanging limply by her side, half-open, with fingers slightly curled inwards, her hand turned outwards, exactly as if she were holding a tiny hand, the small fingers finding their reassurance by clinging to hers.

                  She continued to watch the roundabout, but less intently. Instead of following one place, she looked around at the various children scrambling to choose their ride, or, once the machine got going, holding on tight, waving at parents, or turning around in their seats to get a better look at who else was riding. And now, I noticed, the woman's lips were moving from time to time, as though she was talking quietly. Once in a while, she would look down at her side. But I could see no one there.

                  This strange behavior went on for several minutes as I watched in fascination. The woman in beige looked for all the world as though she was talking to a child but, although her actions matched all such expectations, I could see no one with her that corresponded to what should be there. Was she deluded, or was I the one who failed to perceive what was in front of me? I resolved to conduct a test, and picked up my cellphone. In a matter of just a few minutes I had taken a whole spread of pictures, perfectly discreetly (I pretended I was scrolling through messages), enough shots, I thought, to ensure that a single badly executed picture would not be the only proof, if proof there was to be.

                  I know what you are probably thinking. I, too, have read enough ghost stories to know that paranormal manifestations are often invisible to the naked human eye but can be captured, with luck, in a photograph. I was sure that once I committed the phenomenon of the beige lady to a photographic medium, the "ectoplasm," or whatever her ghostly child was made of, would reveal itself.

                  After several discreet clicks of my phone, I lowered it to look at the results. I closed the camera app and opened the photos with mounting excitement to see what I had captured.

                  Nothing.

                  All the photos I had taken showed the woman in beige in various poses and at various moments, but in each and every image she was perfectly alone.

                  I scratched my head. Metaphorically, I think, but maybe I did it for real, too. I was so perplexed that I was not paying much attention to anything else.

                  I had been so sure that a photograph would reveal the key to the woman's mysterious behavior. Perhaps she was just quietly psychotic, but nothing else about her stood out as unusual or out of place. She was perfectly calm. Her comportment attracted no more attention than did her beige appearance.

                  I thought long and hard. I had been counting on the photographic medium to reveal the truth, but had I really taken a photograph? My cellphone images were digital. When it came down to it, they consisted of nothing but zeroes and ones. Maybe there was something about writing with light on something coated in silver nitrate (or some other light-sensitive chemical) that was important for the process to work. I needed and old-fashioned analog photograph to test my hypothesis.

                  There was nothing for it in the short run but to continue watching the woman in beige. When I looked over at her, she was once again watching the merry-go-round, a light smile playing on her lips. Her complexion was the same color as her scarf, and the color of her blouse and skirt were barely distinguishable from her skin, maybe just a shade darker, but only just. At one point she half raised her right hand and gave a little wave in the direction of the manège, then went back to her silent contemplation. Other people came and went around her. Parents, nannies, older siblings walked up, children ran to them or to the ride and clambered onto mock-machines that offered the illusion of power and movement. There were no more horses with flying manes in this modern century, just motorized vehicles on steroids. The children laughed, they screamed, and sometimes there were tears, but mostly there was a quiet and earnest concentration on mastering these mutant machines. I watched it all go by.

                  My eyes roved around the ever-changing crowd, and when I looked back, the woman in beige had gone, she had melted away. The press of spectators surged around the space where she had been, you would never have known there had been anyone else there.

                  It took me a couple of days, but I made a point of going to one of those fotomat-type places where they would make actual prints from a cellphone. I reasoned that since the images on my phone were digital artifacts, nothing would show up when I was looking at them on my screen, but that a proper photograph, something that you could hold in your hand, would reveal what could not be registered by the poor human eye, like those Victorian photographs of ghostly presences and fairies. I had to wait twenty-four hours before I could pick up the photos, I'm not sure why, I never quite understood the explanations, which always seemed an excuse for poor workflow management or underperforming equipment. But I had waited this long and another twenty-four hours would not make much of a difference.

                  When I returned to pick up my order, I had allowed myself to get a little excited, I admit. I had convinced myself that the mystery of the invisible child would be revealed. Would it be a boy or a girl?

                  The assistant handed over my envelope without a comment, and I waited until I had exited the place before pulling out the photographs to take a look.

                  Nothing. They revealed nothing that I hadn't seen before. There stood the woman in beige, just as I had seen her, in person and on my cellphone, but there was nothing and no one extra in any of the pictures, no murky patches, no suggestive shadows, no hint of ectoplasmic presences or unexplained blotches. In the photos where the woman's hand looked as though she might be holding on to a little fist there was nothing to see, no phantom child.

                  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a little bit disappointed. I really thought that there might be more to the woman in beige than met the eye. That's a trite phrase, but the whole episode made me think more literally about what it means to "meet the eye." They used to say that photographs don't lie and even though that innocent moment is long past, I had been counting on some kind of photographic evidence to prove what I thought I was seeing even though my eye wasn't capable of registering it. I felt as thought at some level, something was meeting my eye, I just couldn't process it in my brain. What met my eye and what I saw were two different things and photography was what reconciled them. But no.

                  Or was it? Another thought began to form. I know that the images I had produced had been made with a digital device. I had figured that the process of printing them out would change something, would show a discrepancy between the data inside my cellphone and the reality, or my perceived reality, of what I had seen. But what if the flaw in my thinking was that these images were never really photographs to begin with, but only representations of photographs? My cellphone translated external phenomena into a series of zeroes and ones, but this was only an approximation of the phenomenon itself. There was no direct interaction between reality—what was "out there"—and the recording device that purported to capture it. In true photography, on the other hand, in what people sometimes referred to these days as "analog," there was indeed a direct connection. The negative produced in the kind of camera people used before cellphones--a traditional 35mm SLR, for example--that piece of film had actually been touched by the rays of light that reached it. That was what people meant when they said that the camera couldn't lie. Those rays of light were physical, real, they burned themselves onto the light-sensitive film, they were not an illusion produced by numbers.

                  This realization set me to thinking. Maybe my hypothesis wasn't wrong, maybe a real photograph of the woman in beige would have indeed proved that I wasn't mistaken about what I sensed. If I had had a proper camera instead of a cellphone to take pictures with, the ghost of the dead child would have created enough disturbance in the light that the film would have registered it.

                  I'll never know. I returned to that café many times, but I never saw the woman in beige again. She, too, vanished. For all I know, she could have been a ghost herself, and if I had not written down what I saw, no one would ever know she had existed.