A big cheese wheel, Gruyere, came bouncing, crashing down from a rack with several more in tow, emerging from the collapsing shelving with alarming speed. The cheesemaker, who doubled as the shopkeeper since laying off his staff a week after the tourist traffic waned, first noticed it impact his piled cheesecloths, still bleeding whey onto the counter. He ducked just in the nick of time and I, swallowing a particularly peppery Garperon sample, instinctively followed his cue, taking cover not from the virus, but from urgent worries of ‘Je Suis’ this or that, of Eagles of Death Metal concerts, of street-side dining with my lover, of Paris, dear Paris, and the now constant familiarity of memorial candles burning on sidewalks where bodies fell.
From the floor I watched a man enter the shop through the door leading in from Rue Monge. His mouth was masked, like everyone on the street, muted and hopefully shielded from marauding RNA invaders. In his right hand was a bag, a grocery sack, brimming with vegetables and sausages and bread and random bottles, perhaps vinegar or even wine, the obvious objects of the list he held in his left. He paused, eyes downturned, looking for something in the list’s scribble that might lead him to buy the right cheese, without noticing the renegade wheels nearing.
“Look out,” yelled the cheesemaker, in remarkable English, and the man did.
The speed, the reflexive grace, with which he did the following was not a fluke. It was the well-honed response of one living in our time, a time that respects reflexes.
He stepped right, pulled hinges wide from the jam, allowing the first wheel to roll perfectly past, then the others, each leading the next with growing cheese-wheel-wobble, followed, as if on march, less battle than to escape, while he stood still, stuck by the cheese procession, between shop and street, his eyes following each, back and forth, until a small, raw milk, Tomme de Chèvre Aydius round marked the end.
I stood. The cheesemaker stood. The man was still standing. Together, we all looked out, six eyes, four frightened, and another pair more amazed than startled, watching the parade. I took another sample from a tray. Goat. The man closed the door, looked once again at the list, and placed his order without tarry. What it was, I cannot remember.
A storm was growing southward from the river. The Seine. Clouds cloaked the University, and the lights marking the entrance to the Cardinal Lemoine Metro station greyed.
It was there, near the subway entrance stairs, that the procession jumped the curb, joining gloved and masked pedestrians hurrying home along the sidewalk. The first drops fell, less intently than tears shed after Charlie Hebdo. Black umbrellas opened above heads. Cafe doors closed at a time they should have been opening. ‘Je Suis.’ Paris. Eagles of Death Metal. Rented trucks. ‘Je Suis.’ Paris. Covid. Je suis, je suis, je suis.
Lightningless thunder quieted creaking rack wood. Cheesecloths dripped. And the cheese procession, it parted, wheels wobbling to stop, to a complete stop, like some would have happen to our lives.
One was seen against a streetlight’s base. Two more were seen beside a bench at the entrance to Square Paul Langevin. A big one, probably the leader, that renegade Guyure that started it all, was found under a car parked on Rue Descartes. How it got that far, I do not know. The rest, they just rolled away, their ash and rind and wash impenetrable to virus or terror, freed to feed Parisian rodents or rot in the sun that most certainly will return.
