Five people one car. Three students and us. One future architect, one future human rights lawyer, a future philosopher and us, older than them, so future us already. A homogenous group of strangers sharing a car.
It’s a question of minutes until similarities will be shared. The female looking, black philosopher starts talking about Renzo Piano, simultaneously I’m taught about nine Rwandese facing trial in court for crimes against humanity in Paris not in Den Haag. It’s going well, we exchange cookies. Every time the philosopher laughs and he laughs very loud, an awkward silence takes place I soon begin to laugh with him. He seems to break invisible behavior rules and I’m already his fan. He later says: do you remember when we were little and would not believe that anything outside our perception existed. Like people we saw on the street would stop existing the moment they walked around the corner. The Lawyer answered: yes or in the subway when you feel as if you always see the same people, the fat man, the beggar, the rich women, the pretty girl you hope that would get out the same station but never does. It continued with how Brest is the city with the highest suicide rates but that they have fixed a big net now under one of the bridges because the bridge was not high enough to get killed only to be hurt badly. We all thought that was very funny, hanging in a net for hours without a cellphone and humiliated. The philosopher got out at le Mans and the lawyer missed his ride to Rennes and had to hitchhike. Alone with the architect he told us how his father was a high rank catholic military general, his sister an agnostic designer, the other sister an atheist bar owner and that he is already married with the daughter of an admiral who he grew up with from a strict catholic, traditional family and is catholic himself now.
Just then I realized, wait a second: this is France and speaking categories: a black, gay leftist and a white, catholic, bourgeois, that pretty much breaks down the counter parties of the whole recent debate here in one car. There was no more time to ask him if he also supports the banana throwing at the justice minister Taubira or the mass demonstrations against gay marriage when we arrived. But I’m convinced that he didn’t belong to the 40 percent who would vote for Front National if there were elections today. Anyway it doesn’t matter, he drove around the corner and probably doesn’t exist anymore.