Friday at the pool.

It’s Friday evening and the swimming pool is miraculously empty except for the presence of one very corpulent man in a speedo that barely covers his penis and testicles — this is what people call “a package” like the leftovers from a butcher shop — dangling precariously below his puffed out belly. He must have Tourettes or some other kind of mental disability because he is blurting things very loudly, to no one. He seems very unaware of how large he is and how threatening he appears when he walks around yelling at no one in this way. He hovers around me like a torpedo, I sit down on a bench to remove my shoes. “Please don’t sit by me, please don’t sit by me, please don’t sit by me,” I repeat in my head. He plops down next to me and throws his affairs on top of mine.
“C’EST QUOI LA NUIT D’EAU?” he shouts into space.
The man guarding the pool entrance stares emptily.
“C’EST QUOI LA NUIT D’EAU?”
He’s looking at a banner draped over the balcony that says, “La nuit d’eau,” publicizing a nocturnal swimming event that must have happened 5 years ago.

The pool is a tiny one, constructed in 1937 and its walls are barely held together by an elaborate series of netting. Rows of personal cabins rise above the pool in a Colosseum-like state of antiquity and deterioration. An attendant hovers around and opens the cabins once swimmers exit the pool, dripping wet. A greenish mildew covers the shower floor.

As I avoid touching the mildew with my foot, an elderly woman asks me a question about the pool closing hours for the sole purpose (it seems) of striking a conversation. She hears my accent. American? She would have guessed Eastern European. She never sees Americans around here. She compliments my French. She works for the mayor she says. She lives by the church. She invites me to dinner and for a moment I forget where I am in space and time.