Mafia Virgins & the Call of Chartres

It’s 1:30 am in the Hôtel des Alliés, rue Berthollet, Paris. 5th Arrondissement, a block down from the Place de la Contrescarpe. Cecille has just left the room, forever, she says. Tant pis. I’m wearing black pants, suspenders, white shirt, smoking a Danneman cigar, drinking the remainder of the Veuve Cliquot, then reaching for the last couple of Kronenbourg 1664s. I let my feet dangle outside the window, watch the traffic below. I'm where I want to be, in the middle of a post-coital, champagne-induced fog, within spitting distance of caverns and grottos, and subterranean haunts that I'll never reveal to anyone as long as I live.


Gerry has been sending me telegrams, letters, phone messages. Go back, he says, return to the scene of the mafia virgins you whoring debauchee, that’s what you went there for, don’t let the whore grab you, it’s the dark Madonna you want. Leave me alone, Gerry, a pox on your pilgrimages. Every time I go off on your pilgrimages, I end up in a fistfight.


On the other side of Berthollet, an old man is looking out on the passersby, smoking a cigarette. I’m flipping through a street map in my plan de Paris. Just up the street is boulevard Port royal and the Académie de la Bière. If I follow that West, I’ll hit the Closerie des Lilas, where it turns into boulevard Montparnasse. From there, rue Vaugirard and the Porte de Versailles. But, luckily, in between is Le Select, La Rotonde, Le Dôme and a hundred other unnamed pockets of booze and derivative souls. I’ll never make it, but my conscience will be clear. I’ll be swept up by the street cleaners somewhere around rue Vavin or the Villa Seurat. Gerry can be appeased, and I'll return to the hotel for a quiet meal, and safe, miles away from those poxy religious freaks.

1:30 in the morning, and I’m thinking, early yet, Paris is awakening. I head for the stairwell, leave everything behind , and take a stroll towards the Closerie, just a little nightcap, then back home for shuteye. Inside, there’s Samy the bartender, and the drinks are unholy expensive, so after a six euro beer, and a bowl of salted peanuts, time to move on. Another couple of hundred yards, and Le Select rises out of the asphalt like a gallic Las Vegas. Bunch of thieves these Montparnasse bartenders, sure, give me another bottle of that Gewurtztraminer and some oysters, what the hell. An oafish man with a head like a coquille is telling me about a place called Compostella, and I’ve never heard of it, but he says, don’t even call yourself a pilgrim. Who said I’m a pilgrim, I never said I’m a pilgrim? I’m eating oysters. We’re all pilgrims, mate.

And, then, it’s four am, and I’m stumbling up a road past the Parc des Expositions, thinking of the Douanier, Rousseau the Customs man, painting jungles while he calculated excise taxes. And, a couple hundred metres further, and two chavs waiting for an idiot just like me, waiting in their suburban discontent, up the hill in Issy-les-Moulineaux, and I might have been wearing dress pants, but I love a rumble, especially when the opposition takes me as a pushover.

I’m walking down both sides of the street at once, I’m a sot from the New World, take me into the Meudon forest. I've got a pretty good idea that with this attitude problem of mine, that this might be the night I've been gunning for, when I can finally really get the crap kicked out of me.

I didn't care much about mohawk rasta man and his sidekick with a face like a tomato can calling me a fag, or as he put it a baltringue. I'm of the Bukowski school - nothing against two men sleeping together as long as I'm not one of them. It was what he said just before.

"Why don't you just go back where you came from. This is chez nous, our neighbourhood."

"Well, actually, this is Céline's neck of the woods."


"What Céline Dion? Cette teupu?"

That earned him a snort from tomato can.

"No, Louis Ferdinand."

"Yea, well I say he doesn't own it."

"Tell that to Racine."

That's when he said he figured I was some kind of a putain de baltringue, which is a fag in chav-speak. Which meant it was time to use Gerry's rule number one for writing: show don't tell. When you want to take out somebody, it's like a law of physics. The maximum violence within the shortest possible time frame. I never aim for the face, that's for the movies, just ask mohawk man how it felt to have his oesaphagus crushed, with a follow up head ram straight out of Swansea.



Tomato can face turned on his heel and ran, pretty well in the direction of Céline's house. Maybe he was related. There were some fires going in the distance, and some dogs barking, and some shadows dancing in the moonlight... you could see the vagabonds were really taking control again. You wouldn't be surprised to see Villon come through and say hello. I pushed my hiking boot into Mohawk's throat. He looked way better to me on the ground.


"Louis Ferdinand's coming back my friend, he's coming back with his dogs. He'll be looking for you..."

Dawn was breaking; it was time to move out of the forest, and onwards to Versailles for breakfast. I was getting thirsty, and needed to get cleaned up.

The Mafia Virgin

I threw out my boots yesterday, dragged them out of the shed, tossed them into the bin, watched a couple of stoned out garbage men from Amstelveen municipality fire them into the shredder, and then they were gone, recycled somewhere into the great stockpile of renewable energies. Those shoes went from Paris to Chartres three times and took me 800 km from St Jean Pied de Port to Santiago. The hard toe served me well on my last foray to Chartres, when two sauvageons emerged from the Meudon forest at four in the morning, who had never heard of Charles Péguy, or Villon or Céline, who lurked up in that same forest with a couple of mean dogs to keep the world at bay. Like in every other profession in France, the chavs in France wear a uniform. This one had a Mohawk haircut, and at the nape, three tresses of rasta beads, and his face had the hard tanned leather texture of someone who slept outside. He looked hard enough, and my lucky day, no dog, he had no knife, just a small chain he was swinging a little too casually.

“What, you some kind of a pédé?”

Sure, I responded, and that got him close enough to put the boots to him, pilgrimage or not, he went down.

By the next day, I was already out on the plains of the Beauce, one foot in front of the other, seventeen hours through the Meudon forest, past Versailles, and well into the Vallée de la Chevreuse. But, when the legs hurt like that, and a burning wind is cutting your face, all the useless thoughts, about reputation and the job you quit, and where’s the money….it’s still there, you’re still caught up in it for the time being, but it's losing its grip on you.

Anybody can get fired, all you have to do is show up at your job for a while, don’t worry about it, people will get sick of your attitude, or your expectations, or even your ability or your youth or your good looks, or none of the above. But, to walk away from it, it’s like sitting in the stands at the horse track, and not placing any bets, then walking away, no richer, but no poorer, but knowing you belong to nobody.

Anybody figured out how rich it feels to say no? You can be a millionaire and still a slave in today’s world. But, you can also be the happiest man alive if you refuse everything that comes your way that goes under the label of “career advancement” and hit the open road. If that road takes you to Chartres, don't ever make the mistake of thinking it's a Christian site. It's pre-Christian, hellenic, pagan.

The Chartres labryinth.

Tell you what you think about during these walks, you think about your feet. Pilgrims don’t believe in listening about God, they’re putting God to the test, not the reverse.

So, when your friends have deserted you, and your dreams have been shattered, step out onto the Beauce plain, where the wind is hard, and at least nobody’s pretending to care about you, and remember Jacob Boehme’s words, that a man who is ruined before his time is a lucky man indeed, and if you make it through a couple more days of that, you’ll arrive at the labyrinth, and see the mafia virgin.

Notre Dame de sous-Terre, our Lady of the Underworld, one of the dark madonnas, or mafia virgins, one of the few that escaped the puritanical wrath of the French revolution.

These dark madonnas are hidden away in crypts, partly to protect them, partly because they are occult, and evoke sorcery and the black arts.