WAITRESSES

Rona Lorimer

In the café, BFMTV is always playing on a screen above the comptoir. The other night it was news that
President Emmanuel Macron was eating in a different restaurant, in Rue de Courcelles. I’m not sure why
that’s news, although it always is. A cordon of CRS had formed and were shooting tear gas and grenades at
a small group of people protesting Macron’s obscenity -- the meal cost about the amount that a single
cheminot had lost by striking in the month of December. We had just finished our shift and were locking up.
Our restaurant Café du désir en paradaiso is a much less fancy kind of café, in fact, it’s kind of trashy, but it is
nonetheless near to the Rue de Courcelles. ‘Shall we go?’ I said to Rosita, who was counting up the tips,
and the till. She was spreading all the bills across the counter, counting piles of fives, tens, twenties, fifties.
Every time she reached the fifth bill, she put it into our tips jar. The till is old, so there’s no way really of
knowing how much comes in for cocktails. Rosita likes order. Marlène was sweeping the floor in a
lacklustre kind of manner and rolling a cigarette with her other hand. Rosita said she didn’t want to go, she
was tired, she wanted to go and see Born in Flames at the squatted cinema nearby.

BFMTV was on again on Wednesday, as we finished our shift. I had spilled raspberry coulis on my white
shirt in the morning and was now cutting it into pieces to use as cleaning rags. Rosita had stolen some of
Tinesh’s, our boss’s, cigarettes from the drawer under the till and was smoking them, lying on the counter
with one leather-booted foot on the till. Marlène was idly reading Griselidis Réal’s black notebook, which I
had lent her, and in which she records and itemises all of the desires of her clients, what they did together,
and how much she charged each client.

We saw on the TV that Macron and Édouard Philippe had been eating dinner at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant
in the château at Versailles. They had to be very careful about choosing the waiting staff who would serve
them. The restaurant ran almost entirely on ‘extras’ – zero-hour contract staff supposed to fill in on busy
Saturdays. There were not many permanent members of staff available that day, which was, as it happens, a
Wednesday. Their head waiter fell sick with flu, and because of worry about coronavirus, was rushed out of
the restaurant, and all the starched tablecloths had to be rewashed, ironed, and starched before that
afternoon. On his way home, distracted by the tips he would surely be missing that night, his mobile
telephone was pick-pocketed on the RER, and so the management was unable to find out who would be a
reliable team to put together for that night. Brigitte Macron had made the reservation at the last minute,
and the management, flustered and proud, had promptly moved the table of a reservation made six months
ago by the National Society for the Protection of Wolves for their inaugural ceremony. The NSPW were not
happy as the change meant they would have to sit at two different tables in the smaller dining room and
they were worried about the implications this would have for the advancement of their campaign.

The management, who had never met most of the waiting staff before, arrived mid-afternoon in a slick
black Citroēn, and pulled all of the waitresses and waiters into the kitchen to explain who was coming, and
to interview everyone. The first that they interviewed, Delilah, twenty-four, seemed far too enthusiastic
about serving Macron and Philippe, and was told that she must do cocktails and stay away from the tables.
The second, Kevin, a twenty-eight-year old six foot tall bald waiter from Lille with a Nazi tattoo on his
wrist, was decided unfit for service; not because Macron would care about the tattoo, but because it would
be bad for press. Kevin had been in a Nazi bicycle gang when he was a teenager and regretted the tattoo,
and had actually been working extra shifts in the restaurant on top of his librarian job at the IUT Saint-
Cloud to get it erased. The third, Constantin, was tall and silent and had done silver service impeccably a
few times for the restaurant with his girlfriend, Coralie, who was the fourth person interviewed. Each time
they had never said a word and this was exactly the kind of invisible care needed for the occasion. The
management, two men in suits called Jean-Pierre and Pierre-Michel, who lived in Brittany and had an
privately romantic and publicly business-like relationship to one another, looked at each other with
furrowed eyebrows and realised they had found a reliable pair for their team. However, because of a
previous conviction, which no-one present knew about, for burning down a meat factory in Grenoble,
Constantin decided it would be best to stay out of the matter and politely refused. Jean-Pierre and Pierre-
Michel were rather vexed but did admit that because these were all zero-hour contracts, technically no
contract had been breached, so they chose Constantine and two other members of staff, Aimé and Jacques,
who seemed like straight up fellows. In any case they had no choice.

All went well during the dinner -- which was attended by two hundred CEOs of companies such as Coca
Cola, Black Rock (life insurance), Lubrizol (green energy solutions, the factory that exploded in Rouen in
November), Welkit (manufacturers of tear gas), Verney-Carron (creators of Flash-Ball), and Lockheed
Martin. The service was so excellent and the food so good that the guests barely noticed the noises of the
three hundred demonstrators outside, screaming ‘MACRON DEMISSION’ and things about decapitating
previous leaders. The three, Édouard, Emmanuel, and Brigitte, sat companionably together and ate
exquisitely prepared dishes as part of a tasting menu, each plate coming out perfectly placed on the table
before them by one of the appropriately discreet hands, of Coralie, Aimé, and Jacques. Each hand was
framed by a white, starched shirt cuff. The waiters and waitress were so good at their job, remaining
tastefully invisible. Macron nonetheless remarked upon this at a moment when some of the foie gras was
perhaps less good, and he became distracted thinking on these three young people’s discretion, young
people who doubtless came from the lower classes, perhaps from Picardie, or from Poitiers, but whom,
nonetheless comported themselves as if they’d had a brush with something higher, refined. He sighed, not
really listening to Édouard, wishing that most of the populace had comported themselves with the same
kind of discretion since November 2018, here being the proof that such a thing was possible, he thought,
looking at Coralie’s starched sleeve as it took away his plate. Just then he noticed that on the palm of her
hand there were three tattooed dots in the form of a triangle, and wondered what it meant, momentarily
perturbed.

The real disaster started later, after the seventh course, when Édouard’s plate, some kind of fancy trout that
BFMTV had no way of describing, was taken away. Beneath the plate was a small note, obviously put there
by one of the discreet serving staff, it said: NOUS, LES GILETS JAUNES, ON EST PARTOUT, ON EST
DANS TA SOUPE, ON DANSE SUR TON ASSIETTE. Édouard Philippe blanched and spat out a piece of
dill which had got stuck in his teeth. Brigitte Macron, who already looked like she had been resurrected
once, fainted and fell off her chair, one Louboutin crashing into Emmanuel’s leg and bruising him severely,
blue Chanel dress revealing a pair of Spanx. After that, it was absolute confusion. One of the other waiters,
whom no-one had suspected, gave a quenelle -- a gesture that had to be explained to Macron (who was only
pretending that he didn’t know) by his intern whose name he did not know -- somewhere between a Nazi
salute and a fuck you sign, coming from the alt right icon, Dieudonné. Coralie, filmed in a spectacular
tracking shot by one of the BFMTV cameras, ran across the space, dropping a tray full of marinated
endives on to the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and delivered the fascist waiter a flying kick.

Meanwhile, the National Society for the Protection of Wolves had grown increasingly irritated during the
soirée by the bad service they were receiving in the other, empty, room from the business dinner. They had
been waiting too long for one of their courses and this feeling of irritation had been generalised into a
feeling of how they were sidelined in general by parliament and as a political cause. Macron was clearly on
the side of the barbaric shepherds of the South, who would nail the wolves they caught to the doors of
local churches in the form of crucifixion, or hang them, feet bound, to wooden posts by way of warning to
the other wolves. There was still a division in the society of the group about this, some laughing at the
‘barbaric’ paysans of the south, and believing that the wolves were not able to understand the gesture as a
warning; others saying that of course the wolves were sentient and intelligent beings and could understand
it as a warning. In 1983, this had caused a split in the group between those ‘genuinely interested’ in the
rights of wolves, and those more interested in the wolf as a metaphor, as a back to the roots birth of the
nation Nordic-style myth, who focussed more on the discourse of reintroduction of France’s ‘true
character’ and origins. Those interested in the ‘rights of wolves’ turned out to have metaphorical
investment in the question too — and were only concerned in the question of how the shepherds treated
the wolves as part of a discourse about how the south and shepherding had become a place and a
profession increasingly inhabited by muslims and immigrants. This faction was joined by Brigitte Bardot in
1997, who had insisted on putting a statement against halal meat and kosher meat on their mission
statement. This was to the dismay of four of the members – the others had accepted in view of her
prominence as a public figure. In 2005 the two sides of the NSPW had decided they had too much in
common, and that they were too small as a movement, and had decided to reunite. There were some
differences in the group regarding whether they considered themselves most affiliated to Macron or to the
FN (now called the RN), but they came, largely, from the same 14th and 16th arrondissement high Catholic
bourgeois milieu in Paris. The dinner was not going well. They were now arguing over this old dispute,
having spent years ignoring it, deleting it from the agenda of each meeting. Having waited too long, the
sixteen members of the NSPW decided to make themselves visible, to the restaurant, the waiters, or to
Macron and his CEO’s, they weren’t sure. But they had an improvised general assembly and voted
unanimously for a) a flashmob and b) to discuss the issue of wolves and metaphors another time. Hurling
glasses and forks they stormed into the dinner shouting JUSTICE POUR LES LOUPS, NI JUSTICE NI
PAIX NIQUE LES BERGERS (which did not exactly rhyme), MACRON, VOUS COCHON, LES LOUPS
SONT LES NUMBERS ONES and BERGERS BERBERS BARBARES, exactly as Coralie delivered her
flying kick to the antisemitic waiter.

**

The BFMTV report did not contain all of this information but Rosita and Inès watched it in awe from the
Café du desir en paradaiso, Rosita even taking her boots off the till and sitting up straight as she chain
smoked more of Tinesh’s cigarettes. They then had to explain it to Marlène, who hadn’t been listening.
Marlène said it didn’t surprise her, that it was a shame that such a perfect gesture had been ruined by the
Nazi salute of the other waiter. The other two were sure that he was not involved in putting the note under
Edouard Philippe’s plate, they had watched the BFMTV live coverage which had been edited in such a way
to show you the whole of the room. The Nazi waiter was clearly in a different part of the room. Marlène was
a bit dreamy and bored, deep in Griselidis Réal’s description of a client who had wanted her to read him
Marx’s Fragment on Machines while stroking his penis with stuffed squirrels, remunerated at 1000 swiss
francs an hour in 1972. Rosita got annoyed with Marlène, and said Marlène was not paying attention to
anything currently happening, the general strike, storm Chiara, or the coronavirus, and she might as well
not live anywhere. Marlène threw her book on the floor and told Rosita to fuck off, BFMTV’s editing was
not to be trusted, even for the geography of the room.

Inès said that she was convinced that waitresses were revolutionary subjects, after all, you can be paid to
serve but not to care, that is the beauty of wage labour. Bosses always get confused and think you actually
do care, just because they’re paying you. They get confused between value and truth.

‘I agree,’ said Rosita, glaring at Marlène who had picked up her book and was now mopping the floor.
Marlène was oblivious. ‘Some waitresses are revolutionary subjects. We get so close to big power, like sex
workers do. We have a traumatic experience of having to serve those who oppress us.’

Inès said, talking about herself, that some waitresses were also sex workers and that the work was not the
same kind of work, but that both sex workers and waitresses were revolutionary subjects. ‘The joke is
always on the john.’

Marlène glared at both of them, and spat into an ash tray. Rosita carried on polishing a glass. Inès said she
was excited. ‘If the strike fails, as it will, since the professors and the unions are currently betraying the
base -- all the non titulaires, cheminots, ballerinas, firemen, booksellers, precarious workers, unemployed
people- in a grand performance of unions still being relevant, just to have their little défilé up to
Invalides… well, if the strike fails, at least it’s true that, across the whole country, since the gilets jaunes
movement, every single waitress, waiter, Uberdriver, porter, nanny, school teacher, hates Macron and Édouard
Philippe. In six months, something else will blow up.’

Rosita said she agreed, and that this had never happened before. She said she felt disgusted by the way the
unions had ignored all those people, and that she felt it almost like contempt, like the contempt of the
university professors for the cheminots. Marlène asked what she meant. Rosita said that the transport strike
in December had been so effective, and that no-one in the universities had to go to work, but that when it
came to their turn to set fire to their workplaces and continue the strike because the cheminots were broke,
they hadn’t done it. Inés said that university professors, since they belong to a superior class, always have
some very well-expressed reason for anything, but that it’s always some kind of completely untrue and
stupid thing. Rosita was leaning across the counter excitedly, grasping Inès’s hands. She dragged hard on
the cigarette, got smoke in her beautiful eyes, and said ‘The bourgeoisie works by outsourcing, especially
now -- they don’t like to use their own hands and legs and arms, so they outsource this all to us, an extra
hand to look after their little children, a few fingers to wash their floors, another hand to jerk them off, a
hand to choose out their clothes, a hand to go out for dinner with them at a gentleman’s club, a starch-
cuffed hand to serve them their soup… it’s the invisible hand of the market.’

Marlène looked up a little bit more affectionately and batted her eyelashes at Rosita. ‘That’s not what the
invisible hand means,’ she said. But she added she agreed about the outsourcing principle, and said that
not just hands, but each body part was outsourced. Every bourgeois body was made up of a little team of
other bodies. Inès felt relief that Rosita and Marlène seemed to have stopped arguing. Marlène looked at
them and said that each little hand should arm itself. Both Rosita and Inès had noticed the waitress’s hand
tattoo: three little dots on the palm of the hand, meaning, MORT AUX VACHES (death to the pigs). They
were excited about this and resolved to find the waitress in question.

By now it was midnight, so they left the bar.

***

Waitresses knocking over cups, chairs, cleaning and polishing their guns in the other room, stealing cash
from the till. Concealing semi-automatic pistols in their frilly pinnies.