Read Online It's Not Love, It's Just Paris by Patricia Engel - Free Book Online

dealing with him than with me, “I need someone with experience. I know you understand. Explain it to her, yes?”
    “She speaks five languages,” Naomi came to my aid. “That has to count for something.”
    But the woman already had her eye on some potential customers fingering a small bronze statue of a lady petting a bear and waved her palm toward me indicating our meeting was over.
    Rachid found us a table in a tearoom carved out into a tent between furniture stalls. Our waitress couldn’t have been older than sixteen.
    “Look at that,” I said. “Why can’t I get a job doing what she’s doing?”
    “My friend,” Rachid dragged on his cigarette, “Don’t take it personally. Les Puces, like Paris, runs on connections.”
    “It’s kind of hard not to when they’re blaming your personality.”
    “It’s too bad you’re not Arab. I’d hire you myself but nobody is going to buy a FREE GAZA shirt from a Colombian girl.”
    “She doesn’t need to speak Arabic to take people’s money and give them change,” Naomi argued. “It’s mostly tourists around here anyway.”
    “Look around us, girls.” He motioned to the crowds swelling the flea market pathways, a mix of euphoric map-in-handtravelers, troupes of denim-clad teenagers, and hobby-haggling collectors.
    “People don’t come to the Puces for the merchandise. There is nothing in any of these stalls that anybody
needs
. People come for the experience of being sold to. They want conversation. They want smiles and charm. They want to feel like they’ve discovered a treasure, and they want a negotiating adventure as part of the show so when they take their little prize home and their friends ask, ‘Where did you get that?’ they have a passionate tale to tell. Nobody comes to the Puces for the junk we sell. They come here for the seduction. They come for the
story
.”
    “That’s a long way to go for a story,” Naomi said.
    Rachid laughed at her. “Look at you two girls. You came all the way to Paris, for what?”
    Naomi didn’t hesitate. “To get away from home. A long vacation.”
    “I came for education,” I said, though I didn’t even believe it myself.
    “Liars.” He shook his head. “For a vacation, you go to Club Med. And, for education, you could have stayed home. Both of you came to Paris for the same reason all these people come to the Puces. You came for a story.”
    My mother hardly traveled except for her charity missions back to Colombia delivering medicines and clothes she’d spend all year collecting. She and my father weren’t vacation types. If she were to go anywhere out of pure pleasure it wouldn’t have been Paris but to Lourdes, on one of those all-inclusive religious pilgrimages. Though she’d long ago defected from her gang of nuns, sheremained an aficionada of the divine and made me promise that I’d visit a church up the road from the House of Stars at least once. She’d heard it was a real miracle factory and wanted me to add to the chain of prayers for my brother Beto.
    I didn’t like to talk about him. I wasn’t secretive but I’d read plenty of books on his condition, comparable case studies, and even took an additional minor in psychology hoping to understand him, though I’d never met another boy like my little brother, gloomy from the womb, never kicking, as if he didn’t care whether or not he was born. I’m not exaggerating. I hate exaggerations. Life is unbelievable as it is.
    She will never mention it, and I only know because I was five at the time and have been cursed with a very sharp memory: Beto’s birth almost killed our mother. He never smiled, never laughed, and barely played as a toddler. Mami thought maybe he was disabled, but he walked fine and spent his energy wiggling out of hugs, running away from us. He was born on a hunger strike, too, and now, at fifteen, Beto was skinny like a girl before her period, with dim muscles and a curved spine, shadowy eyes and stringy veins