Things fall together
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- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- July 30 – Rue des Rosiers – Evening
- August 10 – St-Saturnin-lès-Apt, Provence
- August 14 – Nolay, Burgundy
- August 15 – Troyes, Champagne
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July 28
For the first time this morning, the knot in your viscera begins to slip a little. Who knows – perhaps the beast that spends its time trying to chase you down has gone on a little holiday himself?
Yesterday, Versailles – a suburb that’s really small city unto itself, with a comfortable feel. Which is surprising, given the straight boulevards and gridded streets. Many of the houses along the avenues are fronted by lushly planted, tranquil yards. Proust and Wilde, apparently, found the atmosphere congenial enough.
For most of the day, you wandered in the gardens and found them so engaging you never made it to the palace. Gwen will have to wait until next time you come to Paris for her Hall of Mirrors experience.
But you did walk around the “hamlet” to which Marie Antoinette, when feeling overwhelmed by court life, used to escape, assuming the role of an Arcadian shepherdess. Utterly bizarre this potemkin village, surrounded by a moat and built just a stone’s throw from the Grand Trianon, where the game of politics was played out in earnest. It’s a design worthy of a modern-day Disney “imagineer” – the structures, thatched cottages and farm buildings, scaled just a little smaller than life-sized, endowed with the proportions of contrived innocence. Not actually inhabitable – all for show – yet living within the hameau’s precincts, real cows, sheep, asses, ducks and chickens.
Wandering on her own, clearly mindblown by the dreamscape, Gwen snapped a photo of the mill with its little waterwheel, then strolled across a patch of lawn and took a deadfall straight into an overgrown, half-hidden stream. From a few yards away, you watched as she disappeared completely, save for her arm in its purple cast, somehow holding the camera aloft and clear of the drink. You ran toward her, but she’d already emerged, completely soaked and weeping in shock. Sun hot enough that she soon
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pictured them rolling on the floor with laughter.
announces her intention to become a psychotherapist. And why not? since she’ll have had years of practice riding out the emotional whitewater you and Katie manage to churn up.
Getting on to dinner time, you wend downhill toward the Gare du Nord. On a narrow street off the rue de la Goutte d’Or, you spot a promising Moroccan restaurant – inexpensive menu, a couple of families with young kids among the patrons. You sit down, order food and what comes is well-prepared and richly flavored. But subtly, as the meal progresses, a growing sense that your presence is more tolerated than welcome. Years ago, in East Jerusalem, you’d experienced something similar, though more acutely and under riskier circumstances. During a late evening walk from the old city toward your hotel, a little high on wine, you came to feel first one set of eyes boring into you, then another and still more until you’d reaped the full, almost palpable sensation of the quarter’s collective will that you disappear, preferably in a flash, as if astride Mohammed’s horse. Vanish, or else. But you were earthbound and your feet of clay had landed you in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing for it but to put left in front of right – deliberately – not too eager, not too slow. Send out a vibe that says I am leaving at the fastest pace my dignity will allow – in the same manner as you might wish to leave if you were in my shoes.
What had you been thinking, or not thinking – taking a stroll down an avenue named for Saladin as though it were Positively 4th Street in a sixties midsummer’s night dream? Why now, in your presumably wiser middle age, had you gone and forgotten that in some places you’re seriously Other.
Katie, who, from the get go had been skeptical about walking through, much less having dinner in a North African neighborhood, picks up on the room tension, and begins to chew more rapidly. Across the table, you telegraph slow down. Gwen unfazed, finishes her lamb stew, pats her lips with her napkin and announces herself
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the-wall pastry shop just down the block.
The shift in energy between one space and the next on the same street is like night and day: the fellow from whom you order three beignets and an espresso à emporter treats you with the open affect New York deli counterman. All to the good. Onward then, toward the nearest Metro station where, in the quickening darkness, you find yourself trying to plow through the single most dense and chaotic tide of urban humanity you’ve experienced in lo these fifty years. Times Square in the bad old days doesn’t hold a candle to the intersection of boulevards Barbès and Rochechouart. Everything swirls through this crossroads – true obverse of the Louvre pyramid – the only fixed points being three African women, zaftig and gorgeously attired, who stand motionless at what seem to be strategic points only they can sense, hawking bottles of mineral water immersed in ice-filled buckets at their feet. What are they thinking? At five francs a hit – same price as at the tourist hotspots – they’re not pulling any customers out of this crowd.
Around and about the water sellers, motile waves of people surge, some folks, like you, aiming themselves at the staircase to the Metro, which is elevated here. You go with, yet try to bend the flow, and without too much eddying round, wash up on that shore. The steps lies half-obscured beneath a carpet of refuse so dense as to appear nearly rococo in its effusion. Beneath this layering you can glimpse the extreme corrosion of the staircase itself, such that it has become, literally, a lattice-work of metal. Up you leap, Katie and Gwen close behind, finding your footing where you may, weaving and dodging to avoid being knocked backward by those bounding downstairs. You gain the landing, where the scene is no less frenzied. To either side, as you feed your tickets into the turnstile, multitudes of people shoot past, many vaulting over the barrier with easy grace, as though theirs is the standard mode of entry.
Once on the platform, you survey the streets below. When was the last time a green-suited sanitation crew came through, scrubbing the sidewalk within an inch of its life? From this vantage, it’s clear that the maintenance of a nearly Swiss standard of cleanliness and order, so rigorously applied in central Paris, has here been utterly abandoned. Yet this is central Paris. Nonetheless, the air feels differently charged EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 131
quarter possesses a micro-climate entirely unto itself.
By some miracle, the three of you find a tranquil spot on the platform, unwrap and eat your still-hot beignets. Just as you’re licking the powdered sugar off your fingers, by good fortune comes the train. Change at Pigalle for the number 12 to St- Lazare.
After midnight now and you’re back in Asnières, buzzing with espresso and adrenalin, scrawling away at the desk of the hotel room in your sleepy banlieue. Girls out like lights.
What a difference an arrondissement makes. Tonight a dinner just as Semitic as your last, but of another order entirely. Walking through the Marais, you spot evermore frequent signs in shopwindows announcing the arrival of the putative Mosiach – in the person of the late Menachem Schneerson, Grand Rebbe of the Lubavitchers based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
From one of the restaurants, the smell of falafel entices your nostrils and you enter through a restaurant doorway into a transplanted microcosm of Tel Aviv. Katie and Gwen sit facing the street. Sitting across from them, your view is of a huge, brightly colored mosaic that takes up the entire rear wall. It shows a bustling street scene in what looks to be an East European ghetto, probably Lodz or Warsaw, sometime around the turn of the last century.
The food arrives. Reasonably good, standard Mediterranean fare – no better nor worse than what you could get for two thirds the price in New York. But the whole meal, dessert included, takes less time than the entrée course at a typical Parisian brasserie. Katie and Gwen head outside into the still-light evening while you double back to get a closer look at the mosaic. It’s an ambitious piece of work, intricately crafted, and it takes a moment for you to notice, hanging framed on the perpendicular wall, a black and white photo that the mosaic artist used as a reference. It’s a view east, of rue de Rosiers in 1890.
When you walk out and turn left, you recognize the street as if by déjà vu. But you’re entirely disconcerted, momentarily unmoored in time. Midway between the EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 132
the window of a kosher patisserie, there came an occupation, wherein most of the people who were young in that photo disappeared for good.
Not improbable either that Meyer would have recognized some of them.
Yesterday, to Père Lachaise to visit Wilde, Colette, Wright and Michelet. This afternoon, to complete your necropolitan tour, Les Catacombes. You venture down solo. Katie professes disinterest, and in any case, someone has to stay with Gwen, who won’t go anywhere near a cemetery – averts her eyes if she even passes one. Lately, when you enter a church, she’ll ask, with considerable urgency, if anyone’s buried beneath the flagstones. Notwithstanding, she’s put in a request for a souvenir – a coin medallion to add to her collection of historic sites. “But,” you ask, “What’s the point of having a memento of a place you haven’t been?” She shoots you back a look you’ve seen before, the one that communicates, distilled to a quintessence, the pathos of your attempts at logic. OK, d’accord – if they have ‘em for sale, you’ll buy her one.
Entry to the Catacombs lies beneath one of the few preserved outposts of the Farmer General’s Wall, one of Ledoux’s follies, and descent is via a narrow spiral staircase cut directly into the stone. It’s a long way down, a journey made all the more unsettling by the absence of any sign indicating how much further you have to go. But then, abruptly you’re there – the stairway gates onto a network of corridors, underground streets marked Rue this and Boulevard that. Apart from you, no one seems to have ventured down en seulle, and as you encounter groups of visitors, you begin to imagine yourself a shade overhearing the strange chatter of the still-embodied.
You overtake a trio of middle-aged Brits, two men and a woman. They proceed at a leisurely pace, their mood jocular, catacombing for a lark, and it soon becomes clear they are completely innocent of this place’s history. Nor can they read French. One fellow speculates that the bones belong to victims of successive plagues and tries to reckon the dates by deciphering the Roman numerals on the wall-mounted plaques that record each deposition.
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“Here now,” the woman says, “what do you suppose the job description was to work down here?”
“‘Must be able to build a wall with human bones,’ I suppose,” replies the third. Brit number one stops to calculate the age of a particularly artful interment. “Ah!” he says triumphantly. “This one’s ninth century.” The shade passes by, says nothing.
Up ahead, four young American women trade remarks calculated to spook one another, as if there’s an invisible camera rolling and this will all turn up in grainy, hand- held glory on MTV. Three of them strike a mock-vampiristic pose before a chamber full of bones that seems to extend into infinity, while the fourth steps back to take the picture. As the flash pops, you try to glimpse the cavern’s far wall, but the black continues on beyond the reach of light.
You press on along the path, wet with drippings from the tunnel ceiling, find a spot where you can imagine for a moment that you’re the only one here. To say you’re filled with wonderment at the scale of the project and its manifest weirdness is no exaggeration. By turns utilitarian, æstheticized, sacred and promiscuous, the mix of paradoxes renders you lightheaded, almost giddy. It is only when you turn a corner and come upon group of fellow troglodytes speaking German that the chill produces an involuntary shudder. Six million skeletons lie interred around you, and though you know they were dug up from scores of church graveyards and moved to these ancient, disused quarries two centuries ago, you can’t help but mentally blend this army of the dead into your image of the six million. It was down here too, during the occupation, that the Maquis established its headquarters in a warren of passageways the Gestapo never managed to fully penetrate.
In some chambers, the bones piled helter-skelter extend at eye level even further back than the dim light will allow you to peer, but facing onto the thoroughfare, the depositions are always finished off with a patterned, often symmetrical masonry of skulls juxtaposed with arm or leg bones, deliberately arranged, calculatedly decorative, never capricious. Occasionally, a surface composed of the knob end of long bones will seem to resemble a paving of rounded stones. It is in these surfaces that the workmen who created these walls inlaid a row of skulls, or a pair of crossed humerus bones, to make clear the singular nature of these materials so that one cannot reduce them – even
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tantalus to the visual play. Just when you focus on an individual detail, you see it within the mass. If you let your focus blur, a particularity forces the whole into coherence.
At times, as you walk, a calciferous rain falls from the mini-stalactites above and your shoe tips become caked with a chalk-white slurry. You linger before a particularly striking deposition and decide to take a photograph. But your light meter reads it as way underexposed even when you set the f-stop all the way open for a fifteenth of a second. No evidence of drippings on your camera, yet moisture must have worked its way inside. The shutter works fine, you can see that by looking into the lens as you rotate the ring, so you bracket as you shoot, hoping one of the exposures works. Even so, the part of you that believes all matter is imbued with spirit taunts you with the suspicion that perhaps this isn’t an electronic failure at all, rather the camera’s way of saying “I’d prefer not to.” Or it could be that the machine is acting out your own internal resistance to taking such a picture.
There’s more to this necropolis, a great deal more, but – to use Milos Foreman’s phrase – you’ve enjoyed enough of this. Unlike the great spiral down, your ascent seems to take hardly any time at all – suddenly you’re at street level, and on the line to have your bag checked at the exit. A minor hubbub just ahead: a young fellow has been discovered trying to carry off a fragment of some long-dead Parisian in his backpack. The guard dismisses him with the gesture of someone shooing away harmless but troublesome insect and places the relic on a counter where it joins a small but significant pile of the day’s looted anatomy, similarly retrieved. Presumably to be reinterred. But who knows which pile it came from? If no one were minding the store, how long, at this rate, would it take for the ossuary to be cleaned out altogether? So distracting has this micro-drama been that you nearly left without buying Gwen her souvenir. There’s the kiosk. Into the slot goes a 10F piece and out comes the golden coin. Monnaie de Paris stamped on one side. On the reverse Les Catacombes curves over a symmetrical quartet of skulls, two up, two down, set in a field of elbow knobs that look for all the world like little blossoms.
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“Paris weeps at your departure,” you joke with Gwen as you drive south through an electrical storm that buffets your silly little green rented car. And in truth, until now, it hasn’t rained once during daylight hours in the two weeks since you arrived. But atmospherics aside, this morning the city seemed intent on holding you to her bosom forever. First M. Claude, your venerable and genial, but technologically- impaired hotelier, found it impossible to properly operate the machine that reads credit cards, so you were forced to sprint among several ATMs in order to hustle together the cash to pay for your room. Next, at the not-so-conveniently-located car rental office you’d reserved from, you found they’d somehow managed to lock themselves out of the safe where the keys are kept, hence a cab ride back to the hotel for your luggage, thence a tour of Paris’s peripheral highways, all the way out to Orly to land up this liliputian Citröen Saxo that drives as they say, comme le shit.
But, all’s well that ends well, and here you are, pedal to metal, south on the payage in the general direction of Provence. Driving by Eric, navigation by Katie, napping on and off by Gwen. You’re doing great, the three of you, under the circonflexes. Vroooom! Au sud!
8 a.m. Thick gray skies. Your breath exhales in mist, yet you don’t feel a chill. At the table to your right, outside the café-tabac across the intersection from La Poste, two guys in casual clothes drink espresso, smoke and talk in Arabic. A young woman walks toward you along the sidewalk, twin baguettes under her arm. From the opposite direction, the buzz of an approaching car, a tiny Renault. The driver brakes sharply, stops, rolls down her window and hails the young woman who strolls over for an unhurried chat in the middle of the crossroads.
What time does the mist begin to lift? Should you order another espresso? The young woman and her friend exchange pecks on both cheeks, the window rolls up. The driver flashes her right turn signal and the car heads toward Roussillon. As the young woman with the baguettes walks past you read the back of her teeshirt: I did it with the
Before stopping here for coffee, you rambled around town, discovered the stairway that leads to the old mill. Bear left at the fountain with the goldfish, then EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 136
mills stood here once, the place being well exposed to the play of wind. One’s been converted into living quarters for a family and you see evidence that the occupants are at home. The ruined barrel of another mill stands nearby. If you searched for them, you could probably find the foundations of the other two.
When you first gained the summit, the family Doberman bounded to within a few yards of you, barking up a storm. But as you neither ran away, nor made an attempt to cross the invisible perimeter around the house of its owners, it trotted off aways, all the while keeping a watchful eye on your progress. Every so often, if you seemed to be heading toward the house, it would approach, then halt, formally reiterating its notion of the line of demarcation. Eventually, this turned into something of a game, until you flummoxed the other player by walking away and not looping back. Out on the promontory, you looked out over the valley shrouded in mist. Assuming the sun fights its way through, you’ll bring Katie and Gwen up later – it ought to be an incredible view.
The two men finish their coffees. One gets up and ambles across the intersection with a rolling, shoulder-heavy gait that reminds you of Bassry. The other, smaller man pays the tab and jogs after him. They climb into the cab of a white van and drive away down the road to Apt. As soon as the van is out of sight, as if the cosmos were exchanging the presence of one vehicle for another, the rumble of a big engine heralds what turns out to be a huge garbage truck, entering from the perpendicular road. The proportional disparity between truck and intersection obliges the driver to execute a series of reverses and turns before he can head up toward the bluff along a street so narrow it seems incapable of accommodating the truck’s width. It’s a path more than a road, laid down in an age of mills, when Occitan was spoken here, long before anyone but Roger Bacon could have dreamed of a metal machine that moved by combusting a black and viscous fuel.
The chair you’re sitting in communicates to your ass that it’s time to get moving and pick up bread. There’s a popular boulangerie on Place de la Fraternity, but the one around the corner is better by far – in fact, they sell the best bread you’ve ever eaten. A little bell over the doorway tinkles as you enter. The young woman behind the counter, twenty-something, has eyes like a Byzantine icon’s, made larger still by rimless, ovoid EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 137
aside for him, then up to the counter. This morning, beneath her apron, she wears a low-cut V-necked teeshirt. Along her pale forearms, a growth of fine black hair. “Bonjour.”
“Bonjour, monsieur.” Third morning in a row, so you’re good for a half-smile. “Une fougasse, s’il vous plait.” She selects one from the bin, lays it on paper, twists the ends tight, hands it to you across the marble counter. Still warm. You hand her the coins. “Merci.”
She puts the change in a small brass dish atop the register. “Merci à vous, monsieur. Au revoir – bonne journée.”
When you step outside, the clouds have transformed from gray to white and are moving northward fast, opening up to reveal, every second, wider patches of blue. An hour from now, it’ll be gorgeous weather, and by afternoon, hot enough to take Gwen to the local piscine where she’ll ply the waterslide as long as she desires.
German couple whose house you’re renting, calls to invite the three of you over for a swim. Charlotte is German, by birth at any rate. For twenty years she’s lived, sculpted and made music in the upstairs suite of a vast and ancient manor house a few miles west of St-Saturnin.
Qualitatively this pool is a bringdown for Gwen over the local piscine – no waterslide – but she reposes on her blanket like a proper sunworshipper and when bored with that, starts to read. The water’s relatively unchlorinated, silky-textured, almost limpid, so papa and his host immerse themselves and swim many a languid lap, conversing. The whole area, Charlotte says, is fast becoming a foreign colony. Peter Mayles’s book primed the pump, then vacationers, especially Germans and Brits, descended in droves. Finding it agreeable and cheap, they not-so-gradually bought the place up. But it’s clear she loves the Luberon still – holiday crowds, Mistral and all – having known it before it became a destination. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 138
Charlotte climbs out of the pool, dries off and sits down on the chaise next to Katie. You float, gaze up into the sky and around at the countryside. Cezanne’s nailed it in his landscapes. Only now, being here, can you see that his paintings weren’t amplifications, rather distillations of what he sensed. And then you laugh out loud. “What?” asks Gwen. Nothing really, just the image of yourself driving that ridiculous little car through all those winding, sometimes downright scary roads to get here. Katie clutching the doorhandle as you took the turns in the Ardèches gorges with some BMW or Mercedes suddenly out of nowhere right on your tail, urging your tiny Saxo off the cliff edge – not necessarily with malevolence, but as an impersonal function of its greater mass and power. In any case, you’ve learned your lesson. Next time you drive in France, it’s going to be in a real car.
Katie’s birthday – the big four five. Celebratory dinner in Villars. One thing you love about France is their utterly literal brand of wysiwyg. If a place is called Le Vieux Moulin, you can be sure there’s an ancient mill within spitting distance. Brasserie Le Terminus, bet your bottom dollar on it, can be found next to the train station. This restaurant, La Fontaine, sits on a tiny square whose center is, in fact, la fontaine. Your table’s outside, only a few yards away – close enough to hear, in quiet moments, the water rilling. That and a summer precursor of the season to come, stirring up the trees.
Last night in the south. Tomorrow, you begin the drive back toward Paree. Stay one night, then home. How they gonna keep you back in New York now that you’ve seen Provence? That first night on the way south, you stayed over at a château- hotel Katie booked on the internet. Strange and silly how you anticipated dinner with dread. In so posh a place, deep in the middle of nowhere, it’d have be a clip, right? And of dubious quality too. But France plays by its own rules, not yours. Mind- blowing: a gorgeous meal, well served, and finished with three cheeses, one of which – though you can’t recall its name – you didn’t merely taste, you felt tingling in your fingertips and toes. Washed down with the wine of the Loire in the Loire. After which you took the spiral staircase to your room, lay on the bed and looked up, through a circular window cut in the ceiling at the converging rafters of the turret above. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 139
Next morning, instead of the roar and honk of traffic on Eighth Avenue, or the harsh cacophony of bottles being dumped from recycling bin into the garbage truck outside your hotel in Asnières, you awoke to crows in the garden and a view out the window of a dawnlit stand of pines.
Whenever you and Katie travel, the question comes up: Could we live here? The spare fundamentals of Provence aren’t right for Katie. Her interior resonates to a lusher palette of green. And apart from the question of how you’d make a living, there’s winter to consider. Between the lack of urban life and the infamous wind that unhinges the mind, you’d probably go barmy in a year or less.
Or would you? In a host of ways this surround, the pines and cypresses, the ochre of the stone walls, the details of the buildings; the cheeses, breads, melons, even the candied fruits and rosé wines that until now you’d no particular taste for – in truth the flavor of the air itself – feeds your senses more abundantly than any place you’ve set foot before. Surely the Mediterranean light counts for a lot given the SADD condition of your gene pool, but that doesn’t explain the multi-tiered affinities you’ve developed for this region – the few square kilometers of topography that lie between the Vaucluse hills and the Luberon. It’s only been a week. Who knew one’s molecules could attune so strongly and so rapidly? You’re going to have a hell of a time explaining to your body why it left here.
Here your fountain pen came to life too, leapt up and plunged into your notebook like Gwen into her swimming pool. Five fables written in as many days. Your stories must have taken heart from her.
Breakfast in the open air near the hotel you stayed in last night. Behind you, thataway, a hundred someodd kilometers south, lies the Vaucluse. But then, you are where you are.
This square, with its church and Halle was once the heart of the town. Open on the sides, the Halle’s thick timber pillars branch out into trusses, supporting a slate- topped roof that runs parallel to the church’s nave and nearly touches its walls. With only a narrow alleyway separating the two buildings, the pairing represents the purest
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the church.
Occupying a niche in the church’s tower, two little painted wooden figures, a man and woman in medieval costumes, strike the bell with hammers every quarter hour. Somehow they manage to get the same bell to sound two different tones. The woman, in her blue dress and white bonnet, pivots first, pealing a high note. The man, dressed in brown breeches and a belted jerkin swivels an instant later, his hammer producing a note about a third lower. Rung one right after the other, the carillon sounds like the word “bonjour” as spoken by a bell. This morning, hanging in the sky just to the right of the steeple’s peak, an early moon, waning to a thin slice of blanched lemon.
Your eye tracks lower, along the roofline of the buildings demarcating the square and the chimney stacks made of ornamented terracotta and surmounted by finials that look like overturned flower pots. A few pigeons roost atop them, but the main avian action is generated by multitudes of starlings that periodically sweep overhead, then disperse.
Gwen’s playing in the fountain at the far end of the square. It’s a modern addition to the medieval surround: a long marble slab laid flush with the pavement and perforated so that ten jets of water, arranged in a row, can shoot straight up. The jets are set just wide enough apart for a kid to slip sideways between them and not get wet. The four centermost streams leap to a height of around five feet and the three on each side to roughly half that. What makes the game a tricky one is that the timing of the spouts keeps changing, controlled by a hidden mechanism that turns them off and on in a seemingly random sequence. Here come a couple of local kids. Gwen stands back, watches them play a kind of twister game. The idea is place your feet astride two adjacent holes, then bend down and reach over to plug a third with your palm. Then, when you’re about to fall over, scramble out of the way. Swoosh! Up comes the water – but if you’re fast enough, you don’t get soaked.
On your table appears a basket of bread and croissants, accompanied by two jars of confiture, strawberry and orange. You wave to get Gwen’s attention, point to the tabletop: breakfast’s here. She waves back, then placing one elbow just above the reach EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 141
true slapstick form, the jet recedes and she is left leaning on air.
not used to seeing in France – you begin to get distinctly weirded-out. By the time you find a parking space near the strangely grim Hôtel Arlequin and lug the suitcases upstairs, your sense of disconcertion had intensified to the point where you feel like you’re under the influence of a not very benign hallucinogen. Katie and Gwen, tired from the drive want to take it easy, maybe have a nap, venture out in the evening. Need to walk, want to map this place out. So you set off by yourself.
What a reversal of sensations from those of the past ten days! All the guidebooks extol Troyes as a model of urban preservation. In the late-‘50s it was among the first cities to be designated un secteur sauvegardé by then-Culture Minister André Malraux. But right away it’s clear: Troyes belongs to the pigeons now, legions of ‘em – and to an astonishing number of day-trippers who promenade the thoroughfares and amble slowly and in close formation along its medieval streets and alleys.
Generally you love this kind of cityscape, even tricked up in postmodern trappings, but Troyes has a nightmarish quality to it, a dimness in broad daylight which feels all-encompassing – more Lovecraft than Kafka – as though some unknown agent has compromised the very gene pool of the place. Venerable half-timbered buildings line the streets of the old quarters, a good number of them painstakingly preserved, either recently restored or currently undergoing renovation. But for each viable, occupied building, there seems to be a derelict one, maybe two, and the contrast is disturbing to say the least. Here and there, a wooden skeleton survives, shored up with diagonal buttresses. Occasionally an old house has fallen in on itself, leaving a heap of timbers, or else the woodwork’s been carted away leaving behind an empty, rubble- strewn lot.
Nor have you ever seen commercial signage so relentlessly ugly and battered- looking. Even the usually slick corporate logos and plastic chain store signs appear subtly out of whack. And you have to take particular care to watch where you put your feet. A haphazard assortment of materials has been used for curbstones, sidewalk and
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becomes a tactical awareness game.
It doesn’t take you long to realize that Troyes is an amazing place – different from, say, Youngstown, OH, or a thousand other once-industrial towns now contracting into shadows of their former selves. This place presents itself as a tourist destination, a kind of medieval theme park. Yet the whole urban organism appears to be falling into ruin just slightly faster than it’s getting fixed. And there’s an oddly energic quality to this decay, like yeast germinating. It gives off a nearly palpable sense of heat. You’re half-convinced that if you were to focus on a particular detail, shift your eyes away for an instant, then look back again, you would catch it in the act of deteriorating.
Pull your focus back and it’s astonishing how much of the architectural patrimony is simply trashed. You enter a chapel with gaping holes punched in the stained-glass windows, blackened gargoyles and pigeon feathers littering the flagstones to find yourself engulfed by an atmosphere straight out of Huysmans. Another church, where Henry V married Catherine of France, looks very much as though Gargantua passed through town and thrashed it with a ball and chain.
For the first time you begin to understand how, not so long ago, Gothic buildings were widely regarded as eyesores – relics of an ignorant, primitive and thankfully bygone age. Imagine Ste-Chapelle in such condition and one would be hard pressed to see past the surface noise to appreciate its elegant lines. The first time you saw Notre Dame, thirty-five years ago, its exterior was cloaked in the soot-streaked patina of centuries. How different the building’s presence felt then. And then it hits you that some of what you’re picking up on is the failure of globalization to impose its visual language on this place. Despite obvious efforts, it just doesn’t seem to take.
Given the overall state of things, you’d think there’d be lots of graffiti – but block for block there’s less than in Paris. Plentiful instances of vandalism though. Down one respectable-looking street someone apparently used a blowtorch on the plastic entrance buttons of an apartment house doorway, searing them into a weird, half melted, amber- like mass. Against these sorts of depredations and all others, Troyes has fought back with flowers. Windowboxes overflow with geraniums. Planters line the main thoroughfares and well-tended floral displays frame every square. The foliage is real enough, but these bursts of civic optimism come off as attempts to mask rather than
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windows.
Surely, you think, it’s only a matter of time until Troyes delivers up some unsullied image that will permit you, at least momentarily, to free yourself from this undertow of decay and float off on a cloud of esthetic rapture. Isn’t that what France is all about? Ah, here’s a park – spacious and clearly modeled on the garden of the Palais Royale. At the center stands an imposing fountain, its central figures sculpted in luminescent white marble. The theme is familiar though you don’t recall the particular myth: a burly mer-man has seized a young woman who struggles voluptuously in his grasp. Ringing the contending pair, four bronze frogs, mouths agape, shoot arcs of water at their legs. But here once again, any attempt at idealization folds back on itself as grotesquerie. So many pigeons perch on the couples’ heads and shoulders that these are nearly obscured, and a streaked coating of guano accumulates on every surface that the sluicing of the frogs fails to reach.
Caught somewhere between bemusement and horror, you loop back across town toward the cathedral, with its one standing tower. The other either never got built, or else it must have collapsed. In your distraction, you scarcely noticed evening coming on, and you find the door’s locked – too late to go inside. But the exterior is gorgeously sculpted, worth a full, slow circumnavigation. Finally, as you drink in the sinuous lines of the flamboyant Gothic ornament, your sense of Troyes as a bad acid trip begins to turn ecstatic. By the time you’ve made your way around to the apse, the window tracery has started to shape-shift before your eyes as if the stone itself were a plastic, self-animating thing. Radiating out from on high, where the walls meet the roof, a tribe of gargoyles whose expressions you can’t help but read as a living index of the town’s inner torment.
What ravaged Troyes? At the peak of its fortunes, when the great fairs of Champagne emerged as major centers of medieval trade, the town boasted a flourishing cloth industry, situated at the intersection of routes from the Mediterranean to Germany and Flanders to central and eastern Europe. Once too, this was the power base of a bizarrely modern, proto-anarchistic heresy known as the Free Spirit. So much material feels palpably concealed here that half perversely, you’d love to dig deeper. No time though. Tomorrow morning, move on. Let it go. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 144
But some of the more recent insults to the urban fabric stare you right in the face. Not least that the Seine, which makes its iconic champagne-cork loop around the old town center, was diverted into a canal in the nineteenth Century, then partly covered over. Atop the canal, the city fathers – no doubt imagining their own version of the Champs Elysée – laid down Quai Dampierre, the boulevard you’re walking along now. In the process, they split the townscape into an uncenterable thing.
You scan the desolate stores lining both sides of the street. What you could use is another suitcase for all the stuff you’ve accumulated these past weeks. Some clothes for Gwen. But mostly books. And when you get to Paris you’ll probably buy the big two-volume Robert for Katie. Ah, here’s a luggage shop with good prices. In you go, then out again, wheeling a huge red valise. Trundle it back toward your hotel.
Somewhere your read that several big fires badly damaged Troyes, one not too long past. Which may explain the concentration of modern housing estates built near the ancient core. They’re awful buildings, even of their type – prison-like enclaves that face inward, isolated from the surrounding city, and blockading integrative flow among the adjacent neighborhoods. And then there’s Paris. What has it meant, in modern times, for Troyes to be located only a couple of hours distant from such a powerful cultural and economic center of gravity?
How would one approach the task of fixing so large and multiply wounded a place? Or should it simply be abandoned? Jesus, could New York end up like this? Even at your most pessimistic it’s hard to imagine, so long as the city keeps itself dialed into the world’s flow of trade. Towns which, at their bedrock level, function as entrepôts – that constantly draw fresh inhabitants and generate new energies – can take a lot of hits and keep on ticking. Particularly if they’re seaports.
August 17 – Café Bonaparte
Last morning in Paris this go-round. À l’anée prochaine, enchallah. Sky overcast. On your way out to the door, you whispered once again to a torpid Gwen that Paris weeps when she leaves. Last night, as you were eating dinner came really torrential rains, and thunder that shook the windows of the bistro. No sign of it letting up, so there came a point when the three of you ran for it, splashing through puddles, several blocks back to the hotel. You arrived soaked – might as well have EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 145
for her to wrap up in.
A light rain now, but you’re dry under the café’s green awning. In one of the upstairs apartments Sartre and de Beauvoir once lived. So Levent told you when you were having coffee with him here a couple of weeks ago. Levent’s a poet, and hearing this, Gwen interjected that she was too. OK, said Levent, make up a poem. Immediately she wrote some lines out on a napkin that utterly blew his mind. Yours and Katie’s too. Wow, to be so tuned in and ready to engage. Were you like that? Probably not at nine. If memory serves, seven was around when you began to lock up.
Today, you’ve gravitated to more or less the same table and sit facing a narrow street on the other side of which, at the center of a tiny square, stands a trademark Parisian green-painted cast-iron public fountain, its cupola supported by a quartet of karyatids. Someone’s left a mineral water bottle upright beneath the spout and the stream pours in from above overflowing it, a fountain within a fountain.
Mounted on a tall pole at the near edge of the square is a placard advertising an exhibition at the Musée Nationale des Artes et Traditions Populaires. You’d hoped to get there and see it, but time’s up. Che Guevara’s portrait dominates the poster – his visage in its way as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa’s. Surrounding him, a constellation of other timeless “Héros Populaires”: Napoleon, Harlequin, a cartoon farm girl in peasant dress (Jean d’Arc?), Tupac Amaru and a lute-playing troubadour replete with ballooning pantaloons, cape and hose, his feathered hat cocked rakishly to one side.
It begins to rain in earnest again. Your umbrella’s back at the hotel. Can’t go upstairs and borrow one from Simone and Jean-Paul. An African woman passes, wearing a gorgeously printed robe and shawl. A few steps behind her, a young white woman in bell-bottoms ducks her head beneath a splashy floral umbrella. Most passersby make a good faith effort to ignore the rain. Drops fall into the open bags of bread being delivered to the brasseries.
To your left, diagonally across rue de Rennes stands St-Germain des Prés. In front of the abbey, beneath a bus shelter, several people are gathered waiting for the number 39 to Gare de l’Est: a resolute-looking black woman, hands thrust in her pockets, three middle-aged white guys, and a white woman in a black mini-skirt, hair the color of Stephanie Audran’s. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 146
Some time last night, person or persons unknown rifled the glove compartment of your rental car and made an attempt to get the radio too. But they must’ve left in a hurry. Lucky break. It’s possible that in your ecstasy at finding a parking spot so close to the hotel, you forgot to lock the doors.
Check the clock in the abbey tower. A century or so ago, around the same time as new buildings were sprouting on the just-Hausmannized Boulevard St- Germain, some improving spirit punched a hole in the second register between the portico and the louvers of the belfry and stuck the clock in. Despite its roman numerals, it still looks johnny-come-lately.
By your calculation, the clock is running three minutes fast. A young white woman sits reading on the bench in the shelter now. The 39 must’ve come and gone without your noticing since she’s the only one there. Occasionally she looks up from her book and chews a thumbnail. When she drops her head, her hair falls like curtains around her cheeks. Now a young man and woman sit down to her right. He rests a very thick book on his lap. Standing nearby, a woman in a blue and white striped shirt. Every few moments she shifts her weight from one hip to the other.
Glance at the clock again. It is accurate. You see that now – the minute and hour hands are so similar in length, you’d transposed them. It’s just past quarter to nine. A stunning young woman in a chartreuse cardigan, blue jeans and a fire-engine red backpack crosses rue G. Apollonaire heading north on rue Bonaparte. Not far behind her, an ample African woman in a blue denim dress, golden sandals and wrist bracelets.
The 95 bound for Porte de Montmartre stops, whisks the people away. Before long they’re replaced by a bearded man with white hair and thick glasses, who holds the book he’s reading virtually in front of his face. He does not get on the 39 when it arrives. Must be waiting for the next 95. Thirteen minutes to nine now. The abbey bell, apparently, does not strike the quarter hour. A cry of gulls. Half a dozen or so wheel about the tower, then glide out of sight behind the north side of the church. You keep looking for them, but they don’t reappear. In New York, the gulls fly further inland on overcast days than on clear ones. Sometimes they venture in as far east as Seventh Avenue. A bit disconcerting to see them swoop by outside the living room window. What can they be scouting for, a good half mile from the river?
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Three men occupy the bench in the bus shelter now: the myopic geezer, a guy with his legs crossed, and a young fellow with a briefcase hugged between his calves. You’re going to have to leave before the bus comes. Before you find out if the bell will ring the hour. Or whether the chime is broken. Ah, the bus beat you to it. Writing, however fast you manage it, is no match for real time. Two African men, one in a dazzling print shirt, cross rue Bonaparte together, walk past the abbey, and make a left on the boulevard. The white-haired man’s still sitting beneath the bus shelter. What is he waiting for? Only two bus lines stop here and both have come and gone. He’s not reading any more, rather examining something small he holds in his hands. Four minutes to nine. A rag-tag procession of pigeons bustles by on the sidewalk, and one breaks off from the line to peck so close to your toe it could easily miss the crumb and hit shoeleather.
The rain’s abated but the wind still gusts, sets the awning flapping overhead. You bid farewell to the Pantheon yesterday. Saw a special exhibition there, a tribute to Robert Desnos. Attempted to translate a few lines from one of his poems. Should’ve jotted it down – the sense of it remains, but the words themselves vanished into the realm of the tantalizingly forgotten.
A milkman delivers bottles to the Bonaparte out of the back of his little van. A handsome, tall young man in a black suit has joined the old fellow on the bus shelter bench. The newcomer reads, but every few minutes looks up expectantly for the bus. In the square, the karyatids still hold up their end of the bargain, water pours over the lip of the empty Vittel bottle propped inside the fountain. Rain mists under the awning onto your pages and the ink begins to spider. Coffee’s drunk. There’s a regular crowd forming in the bus shelter. One minute to nine. You’re outa here.
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