One Last Jab at Our Sanity?

In the 13 months we’ve lived in our lovely Marais apartment, we’ve never had any plumbing disasters—and luckily so, as I’ve heard tales of unspeakable frustration in getting a plumber to come over and deal with rapidly accumulating puddles in an efficient manner. So it was just our luck that on Saturday night, exactly one week before we’re vacating the premises and moving back to the States, our toilet promptly decided to not work. After some detective work, we applied a temporary fix until we could make it to the only hardware store open on Sunday in Paris (open until noon, at that).

Cut to Sunday morning, when we discover that we have no hot water in the apartment. No way could the two plumbing events be related, we surmised. One problem has to do with a broken part in the flushing mechanism that affects water flow. The other has to do with the water heater, not to mention the toilet pipes don’t even appear to be attached to the water heater. Not a chance, nuh-uh.

What to do? I called our landlord, who lives in the south of France and very rarely puts in an appearance in the city. I proceeded, in my much improved but still somewhat rough-around-the-edges French, to explain that we had an emergency situation with our water heater and needed some advice on how to deal.

“Bah, qu’est-ce que tu veux? Je suis pas plombier.” (What do you want? I’m not a plumber.)

His response stunned me so much I almost dropped the phone. I said I of course knew that, but could he please advise me on how to proceed? Did he have the phone number of a plumber on hand who could help?

It was like I’d said absolutely nothing, because he repeated exactly what he’d said before. We kept going back and forth until he said there was nothing for him to do. Um, WHAT??? I then handed over the phone to N, whose fluency could help tackle this impasse more effectively…or so I thought.

N repeated what I’d already said about five times and then was bowled over by a screaming tirade of several variations on the themes of “It’s Sunday morning! Sunday!” and “What do you expect me to do, you pushy, entitled, American ass? Fix it myself? It’s not my responsibility.” (Oh, really? It isn’t?) N fought back with a few good ones, such as “Yes, we invented this situation to inconvenience you,” “French law states that fixing household problems is the landlord’s responsibility and I’ll quote you the legal code to support that,” and “I find your attitude utterly lacking in niceness and therefore inexcusable” (well, I’m paraphrasing on that last one).

At one point N put the phone on speaker so I and our visiting sisters could hear the landlord’s sustained ranting. This continued for about 10 minutes until finally N threw off his boxing gloves in disgust and said we’d call a plumber ourselves the next day (as of course, plumbers don’t work on Sundays in France) and send the landlord the bill. He finally managed to hang up and was about to dash out the door to the hardware store for the wayward toilet part, when the phone rang. It was the landlord.

He laid on the passive-aggressive guilt-cum-spite tactic real thick: “Well, now that you’ve ruined my day, I’m canceling my trip to Belgium—which I’ve already begun, as you called me while I was driving on the highway—and coming to Paris to show you that I absolutely do not know how to fix your water heater.” Wow. What are you, 13 years old and angry at the world?

N talked him out of this absurd plan but the guy still would not calm down. N couldn’t take it anymore, not to mention was pressed for time due to the hardware store’s soon-to-be closed doors. He pawned the landlord off on his sister, whose French is perfect and who knows far better than us the nuances of national etiquette. She apologized profusely for our “ignorance” of how things “work” in France and for disturbing him on a Sunday. He was still sputtering a bit, but she managed to calm him down. Pfew.

Perhaps we are ignorant and could’ve been more apologetic about calling him on a Sunday at 11 a.m., but holy crow, man! You’re the landlord! You’re the responsible party! We never presumed he should drop everything and get his landlordy ass over here to fix our water heater, but rather very clearly asked for conseil. He seemed more pissed off that we bothered him on a Sunday than anything else, which is a typical French attitude. Le sigh. Well, we learned that our landlord is cranky and irrational and that ce mec là, il est un vrai con. At least we’re out of here in a couple days and so thus don’t have to care.

Oh, and P.S. It turned out that as soon as we fixed the toilet and the tank refilled, the water heater started to work again. The heater was never broken, and we can blame our ignorance of our apartment’s byzantine plumbing system for disgracing our landlord so. All’s well that ends well, or so the saying goes.