Bocar usually got home just before me. I sometimes wondered if we hadn’t shared the same train. He worked the late shift in an unnamed branch of the many-tentacled RATP. He was a slim man, hair clipped tight, always neatly dressed, as if he worked an office job, his crisp starched shirt extra white against his dark skin. But for all I knew he might have kept overalls or a uniform in a changing room locker and worked as a mechanic, or a cleaner. Perhaps he drove a bus, or steered a line of metro carriages through Paris’s dark entrails. Or he could have been a ticket inspector, or played an essential role in passenger safety. He was evasive when I probed for detail, which piqued my curiosity, though I sensed it was a subject best avoided. But over the month I spent living with Bocar and his wife, one June in the mid-nineteen-eighties, I would learn that he contained multitudes.

We sat opposite each other, either side of a bare wooden table, on creaky wooden chairs that might have been salvaged from a smoky pre-war café. Corine placed a steaming dish of spicy tomato rice on the table, then retired to the sofa, explaining that she had eaten earlier. On the first evening Corine offered me a spoon, but I shook my head and imitated Bocar, using my fingers as we both ate hungrily from the same dish. We ate in silence, only in part because neither of my hosts spoke any English and my French was still quite limited.

Corine was French and as white as me, perhaps even more so, and considerably bigger than both Bocar and I put together. It would only be a small exaggeration to say that she used the sofa as an armchair. But she countered her impressive size by being almost pathologically self-effacing.

She was a friend of Nathalie, who was a friend of Agathe who managed a French restaurant in Dublin where I had worked weekends while studying. Nathalie was visiting Agathe and we all ended up back in someone’s flat after work. I got chatting with Nathalie and told her I wanted to visit Paris and improve my French. Agathe warned me that Nathalie would chew me up and spit me out, leaving me broken hearted. But I was nineteen and Nathalie was beautiful and by the time she was ready to leave Dublin we had arranged that we would share her Parisian apartment for the summer and split the rent.

I took a train, then a long ferry ride, watching Ireland recede beyond a foaming wake, the wind in my hair, the acrid stench of bunker fuel in my nostrils. After a mostly sleepless night in an uncomfortable chair we docked. I took another train, terminus Gare Saint Lazare. I extracted some carefully folded francs from my money-belt and bought a coffee to make change, then joined a queue at a phone box, feeling both thrilled and self-conscious at me, an uncouth and barely cultured culchie, having finally made it to Paris.

The phone call was short. Nathalie had found a boyfriend. Her offer was rescinded, though she promised to try to help me out. Disappointed, I spent a few nights in a youth hostel near the Hotel de Ville and somehow talked my way into the job at an Irish pub, mostly by dint of simply being Irish.

I met Nathalie a few days later in a café near the rue de Rivoli. We hugged and somehow slipped into a long passionate kiss that was everything I had imagined and hoped for. Then she gave me Corine’s phone number and went back home to her boyfriend. I never saw or heard from her again.

By putting me up for a few weeks Corine was apparently absolving herself of some unnamed debt or favour that she owed Nathalie. Or perhaps it was the other way around, since it was agreed that I would pay Corine the rent I had originally expected to pay Nathalie.

Corine wasn’t openly hostile, but neither was she particularly welcoming. In any case I tried to make my presence as unobtrusive as possible, leaving early and coming back late. Mostly I only ever saw her over our silent rice suppers. When we finished eating she washed the empty dish, then went to bed, while I sat up late with Bocar watching Mike Hammer reruns dubbed into French on Canal+. The plots were simple enough to follow, and when asked, Bocar would try to explain words I didn’t understand, and if Stacy Keach’s mouth movements didn’t match the dialogue it was an added, if somewhat disconcerting bonus. Once the crime had been solved and the criminals apprehended, Bocar retired to join Corine, while I rolled out my sleeping bag on the still warm sofa.

Over the course of the following weeks the ice gradually melted. Even if we never became particularly close, I felt my French was improving through my conversations with Bocar. He revealed that Corine was his second wife. I assumed this meant he was divorced, but no, he had another wife back home in Senegal. I asked if Corine knew and he assured me that she both knew and didn’t mind. He was entitled to four wives in total, but for now two was enough.

Their apartment was on the second floor of a small house. The living-room overlooked a gravelled courtyard with a cherry tree. Though I was no stranger to climbing trees I had never picked cherries. The sun shone and the dappled shade of the leaves made us half-invisible. We each had plastic bowls, but ate at least half the cherries we collected. An elderly man appeared beneath us. I couldn’t understand all the words, but from his frantic gesticulations it was clear he wanted us to get down from the tree. Bocar had assured me that no one would mind us taking the cherries and I felt betrayed. But I needn’t have. By the time we were back down on the gravel the old man had produced a step-ladder. He held it steady and urged me to climb up and continue picking cherries, while he spoke to Bocar in rapid-fire French. Bocar later explained that the neighbour had simply been worried we might fall. Cherry trees are, we learned, notoriously fragile, and the seemingly sturdy branches could have easily broken under our weight. We gave the neighbour a bowl of cherries for his trouble.

One Friday, on my way to the train station, I caught sight of Bocar waving to me from across the street. Dressed as he was, I didn’t recognise him at first. The long elegant indigo grand boubou that flowed down to his sandaled feet, combined with his embroidered prayer cap, and the three parallel tribal scars on each of his high cheekbones lent him an air of African royalty.

Decades later I tried to find Bocar and Corine online, but finding a Bocar Diallo in Paris or Dakar would be as easy, or as difficult, as finding a Patrick Murphy in Dublin.

On my last morning, I went to the local boulangerie to buy breakfast. I waited my turn, mentally rehearsing my lines, watching a woman, perhaps the baker’s wife, rattle pastries and viennoiseries into flimsy paper bags. I said my piece, trying to be as polite and well-spoken as possible. The woman stared at me in disbelief, then announced loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Monsieur, do you know that you speak French exactly like a black man?” Except she didn’t quite say black man. This drew a round of laughter from the other customers, who all agreed that I did indeed speak French with a pronounced accent. One portly moustachioed man even jokingly encouraged me to “go back to Africa.”

Back at the apartment I sat at the wooden table with Bocar and Corine for the last time. I didn’t tell them what had happened at the boulangerie. We ate our croissants and drank our bowls of coffee in silence. Then I shouldered my back-pack and walked out of their lives, taking the RER from Villeneuve-Saint-George Triage, abandoning the banlieue and its weak-limbed cherry trees to get back to the centre.

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This series of texts, guest edited by Ben Libman, is being published in the run up to minor [i]ncident, a night of readings and discussion happening in Paris on October 12th, 2024. You can find more information about the event and its participants here.

Marc de Faoite is a freelance writer and editor. His short stories, articles, and book reviews have been published both in print and online. Tropical Madness, a first collection of his short stories, was published in 2013. Lime Pickled and Other Stories, his second collection, was published in January 2023. Second Main/Second Hand — a bilingual collection of poems by French poet Michel Lagrange (Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite) and translated by de Faoite — was published in January 2024. He lives in Evian-les-Bains, between the shores of Lake Geneva and the foothills of the French Alps. Twitter: @marcdefaoite

Ben Libman is the author of The Third Solitude: A Memoir Against History. He lives in Paris.