What the Real People Are Like
6 September 2003

I did the research for my doctoral dissertation in Liège, Belgium. I spent two periods of time there: first the summer of 1979, and then, having been awarded a fellowship by the Belgian-American Foundation, the academic year 1980-81. During the latter period, I had a room in a building on rue Wazon, more or less directly uphill from the archives where I spent my days. Each of the floors of this building had three rooms, sharing a lavatory; on the première, or what we would call the second floor, there was a bathroom, of which I was one of the few patrons.

The deuxième, or third floor, where I stayed, had only one other occupied room, the third being rented by a man who never appeared. As I understand it, the room was his legal residence, but he lived with his girlfriend, but for some reason—possibly that she was still legally married to an absent husband—he had to have another address on his identity card. In the other room lived, for most of the time I was there, a young American woman, who had come to Belgium as a missionary for an American evangelical Protestant church. She was very friendly, and I was glad to have someone to talk to occasionally. When she left during the winter and moved to Paris, a young Belgian man moved in, usually accompanied by his girlfriend, and later by a kitten which they adopted.

The floor below included two rooms occupied by somewhere between five and seven Moroccan students from the University of Liège. They appeared to sleep in one of the rooms, and cook, eat, and sit around in another. We could cook in our rooms, because each was equipped with a bottle of gas, a gas hotplate, and a small refrigerator. The Moroccans’ food appeared to consist chiefly of onions, and because they never (when they were present and awake) closed their doors, everyone else got to smell it. I don’t remember who lived in the third room at the beginning of the year, but it was later occupied for a short time by a young man from Poland.

On the rez-de-chausée there were two rooms occupied, at least in the beginning, by apparently Belgian drunks. Sometimes they did not make it back all the way to their rooms in the evening, and one might find them passed out in the hallway, or in their open doorways. In the other room, a large one at the front of the building, lived Michel.

Michel was the closest thing we had to a concièrge. He did do some cleaning of the shared areas, or at least supervised it, and he was the representative of our landlord. The landlord was a moonlighting policeman, who leased the building and sublet it in rooms, an arrangement which he appeared to be keeping secret from someone, either his wife or the tax authorities. Michel himself was both large and loud, an unemployed café waiter, a Spanish Basque raised in France, in his mid-forties, living off the largesse of the Belgian State. Since the public assistance checks arrived without envelopes, and all the mail for the tenants was dumped in a single pile by the door, I had occasion to observe that Michel’s unemployment payments were larger than my fellowship stipend. Thus he appeared to have little incentive to work.

He did occasionally have to take action. One Saturday morning in the spring, my doorbell rang. Each room in the building had its own doorbell, and since my room was at the top of the building, mine was the topmost button. Anyone who simply wanted to get into the building would ring doorbells at random, usually starting at the top. There was nothing for it but to go to the street door and find out who was there. On this occasion, it was the police. They had already got Michel’s attention, and were asking about the young Polish man from the first floor. He had, apparently, stolen a radio from the bar across the street and disappeared into our building. They found him sitting in his room listening to his ill-gotten gains and took him in. At this point, Michel decided he had had enough. Not only had he got himself arrested, he owed two months’ rent. Michel decided to evict him. When he had gone through his room, he said that he found things that other people had missed. “He claims to be a political refugee,” said Michel, “but he’s really just a thief.”

The other tenant Michel evicted only lived in the building a few days. I had never seen him until one evening there came a pounding on my door. I asked who it was. The reply was inarticulate, obviously drunk, asking for a person I had never heard of, and from the timbre of the voice and the direction of its origin, from a large and tall person. I did not open the door, although the would-be visitor pounded and shouted. Finally there came a great crash and silence. At that point I dared to open the door. There, stretched out on his back, with his head against the door of the lavatory opposite was a man at least six feet tall and powerfully built, entirely unconscious. Michel and another tenant appeared up the stairs almost at once. I asked who this was. Michel replied that he had just rented one of the ground floor rooms, but he was nothing but trouble. “Demain, il fout le camp,” said Michel as he dragged him down the stairs—a remark I will not translate. I never saw him again.

When not dealing with drunks and thieves, Michel was a friendly fellow, and more than once invited me into his room for a glass of wine. One evening in particular, I drank with him and two friends. One was an African student named Prosper, who claimed to be the son of the ex-king of Burundi; the other was Prosper’s girlfriend, a Belgian girl, who said nothing the entire evening.

Before I had finished the first glass, I was on the spot. Michel and Prosper could talk of little besides their political disapproval of America. Prosper claimed that his father had been overthrown by the CIA, inspiring him to be a Communist, at least back home if not in Europe. Michel, however, did most of the talking, most of it rather inarticulate. Not wishing to get in a fight, I mostly kept quiet, which impressed Michel, who believed, in spite of my best efforts to undeceive him, that I had come to Belgium to study philosophy. “You can tell he’s a real philosopher,” he said, pointing to me, “He doesn’t say anything!” I was, he said, a rich American, but I had come to Belgium to stay among the “real people.” He had nothing, he said, against the American people, but only the American government. I pointed out to him that there was a connection between the two, but this did not seem to register. Democracy was not a concept he understood.

He was very proud of his heritage as a Basque: a direct descendant of the Cro-Magnon, he said, the original inhabitants of Europe. Likewise he was proud to have been born in the Spanish Republic, where he claimed his father had been a member of Parliament before going into exile on the advent of General Franco. I have never done any research to prove or disprove either claim, but I did try to find Prosper among the former royal family of Burundi in one of those exhaustive directories of royal and noble families. I was unable to find anyone with that name.

Michel also had opinions of the other tenants of the building. He hated the Moroccans. They listened to Arabic radio stations all day, he said, and joined in the regular Muslim prayer times. For some reason he found this particularly obnoxious. I had never heard this, because I was out at the archives all day, and apparently they never did it on weekends. “I’m not a racist,” said Michel, “but I don’t like Arabs.” He regarded my American neighbor, on the other hand, as an angel. “I swear she’s a virgin,” he confided in me one day, as if speaking of a rare and supernatural being.

In the spring, a new tenant moved into the room next to Michel’s, a young Belgian man, and one Sunday afternoon they invited me for a drink in Michel’s room. This was the beginning of an adventure.

Charles, I learned, had just been released from a term in prison. He tried to sound like a tough guy, but when I asked what his crime had been, he informed me that it was passing bad checks. He was from the German-speaking cantons to the east of Liège, and felt a great deal of affinity for Germany. He informed us that he didn’t think that Hitler had been that bad. I was shocked, and asked if he approved of the killing of the Jews. Well, he admitted, he did go too far with a few things. Michel, the professed vehement leftist and anti-Fascist, appeared to take all of this in stride.

Charles took a picture of a beautiful woman out of his wallet.
“This is my wife,” he told us.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“She’s in prison.”
“For what?”
“Prostitution.” He said this without any apparent embarrassment.

Michel proposed that we should all go to a restaurant and have some real Spanish food. This sounded like a good idea, so he went to call a taxi. There was no phone in the building, so this meant going across the street to a public phone, but he got the taxi and we piled in, and Charles entertained us by describing how he was planning to get a gun and boasting of his connections with all sorts of really tough crooks.

The restaurant was thoroughly Spanish and served us a magnificent paella. As we got to the point where we could not stuff in any more, Michel and Charles began discussing the next phase of the evening. This consisted of going to a certain place where there were drinks and girls. As they described the proposed destination, I became uneasy. When Michel had gone off to the men’s room, I said to Charles,

“Look, I don’t want to go to any brothel. I’m a good Catholic; I don’t do stuff like that.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll just have some drinks. Michel might want to go upstairs, but you don’t have to. There’s this girl there, she’s really crazy about me, but I’m faithful to my wife.” That is, the prostitute, I thought.

The next taxi took us to the street across from the main railway station. This was a bad sign, because I knew there were brothels on that street. As I understood it, prostitution is actually legal in Belgium, although soliciting is forbidden. The brothels get around this by stationing a girl in a front window behind a thin curtain, seated in a provocative position, waving her feet at the passers-by. I had seen several of these living advertisements as I walked home from the station in the evening. They would have been more of a temptation if they had been at all attractive, but good-looking women are rare in Wallonia, and none, as far as I could see, were prostitutes.

The first place we stopped could not have looked less like a brothel. It appeared to be an ordinary neighborhood bar, brightly lit with fluorescent light, and entirely devoid of customers besides a family playing cards at one table. I never understood why we went there, but we soon left in favor of another bar just up the street.

This one was a bit more interesting. There was a little bar area in front, where several customers stood, and an area in back with seats where apparently some food was served. This appeared to be the place Charles had in mind. He moved around among the men seated at the table, who might well have been gangsters or actors impersonating gangsters, with an air of trying to interest them in some proposition. I never found out what he was doing, and he got no response at all apart from a few glances of annoyance. Then he directed his attention to a woman with bleached blond hair, marginally less unattractive than the run of women in Liège, who was seated on a high stool by the window. He flitted around her like a moth around a lamp, but she might as well have been made of stone, for all she moved or acknowledged his presence. I had ordered a glass of beer and stood watching the scene with a mixture of relief and disappointment.

Michel, on the other hand, had found someone to talk to, a short, red-faced man, who either spoke no French, or was severely mentally handicapped, or was too drunk to care. Michel began to tell him lies about me. I was an American, a cowboy from Colorado, or maybe Utah—the way the little man responded, if he had said I was from Mars he might have believed him. I withdrew to the other side of the room and examined the jukebox to see if there were any songs I might by some chance recognize.

Then I saw that Charles had joined Michel, and they were together attempting to entertain the little red-faced man.
“Me, I’m a Nazi,” Michel was saying, “and he’s a Nazi”—indicating Charles, and then he pointed at me, “and our friend, he’s a Nazi, too.”
I quickly moved across the room. “No, no,” I said. But Michel took me aside.
“It’s a joke,” he whispered.
“This is no fun,” I said. “I’m going home.” I left the bar and walked back to rue Wazon. After all, I had to be up in the morning for another day at the archives.

The archives closed for an hour at noon every day, and I went back to my room to eat lunch. At about one o’clock the following afternoon I was coming downstairs from my room when the street door opened and in walked Michel and Charles. They were just coming back from the previous night’s festivities. I never found out where they had been.

As Michel said to me, “When you go back to America, you must tell them what the real people of Belgium are like.”
“I will, Michel,” I replied.