The effect of misery is never uniform because our existences are too amorphous to accept certainties.

Paris — When in Paris, I am not very interested in the trendy cafés of the Marais or the Oprah-hating boutiques of Champs Elysées. I would rather be switching trains in Saint Denis, a mostly Arab and North African suburb where I meet Tunisian brothers Mohamed and Miehid.

These brothers of colonial misery will change my perception of what books and well-fed afternoons do to the spirit of a man, how the effect of misery is never uniform because our existences are too amorphous to accept certainties.

I have always thought that poverty, while castrating the psyche, masculinized man.

The well-read bourgeoisie of Italy and the well-cultivated, scarf-wearing straight man of Saint German-de-près are so uniformized by their bookish intelligence and caviar socialism that they cease to look and act like “man.” They begin to feel like stand-ins for the ideas they have so eagerly consumed in their cozy apartments or over coffee between metro stations.

Mohamed is 23 years old and has lived in Paris for four years. He tries to get a lease in decrepit apartments in the outskirts of Paris. He is always denied.

He walks to Gare du Nord every day at five in the morning to go to work. He makes pastries for a living.

The day I spent with him I saw white women holding their purses tight when they saw him, his thuggish walk, his chain, his non-shaven existence threatening their well-inherited bourgeosie.

Mohamed practices boxing and weight lifting. He says that when he was a child in Tunis, he would beat other boys up because there was nothing else to do — the release of latent masculinity over boredom.

He almost killed a man once. The man sprayed a lemon on Mohamed’s face, so Mohamed grabbed him by the head and hit it on the street seven times. The man bled. Mohamed ran. His grandfather was with him. He looked at Mohamed speechless, like saying, “I am proud of you.”

In Paris Mohamed doesn’t beat up anyone anymore. He is too busy making cakes for the bourgeoisie of Montparnasse and trying to pay for his gym membership.

His brother Miehid is 19 years old and came to Paris only four months ago. He doesn’t share the same muscular body of his older brother. He is skinny and feminine. He is doing Ramadan right now. I take him to the Institut du Monde Arabe, where he explains to me the meaning behind the pilgrimage to Mecca and the well-decorated blue doors of a Tunis quarter.

Miehid doesn’t miss Tunisia. He has no friends in Paris. When he walks with his walkman, he listens to the Quran. He says he isn’t hungry; but it is 6 p.m. and he hasn’t eaten all day long.

He says in school, in Tunisia, people are never insulted, only beaten.

I go to Mohamed and Miehid’s house in Saint Denis, where their mother sits motionless in the living room. Mohamed gives orders to his little sister. He eats like a monster. He is the most handsome and the most brutish man alive.

Miehid silently turns on the TV. There is a program about how North Africans who are trying to cross the border to Spain are being welcomed with stones and bullets. And TV cameras.

Mohamed is going out with a white boy he calls “his wife” later that night. Miehid will stay home and talk to his sister about how busy central Paris is.

Once Mohamed is gone, maybe Miehid will change the television channel, and see himself on the screen. And not be sure if one can talk about intensity when one talks about misery.

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