Fly-Fishing the 41st (3 page)

Larry greeted me at the door. It was the first time I had seen his warm, inviting look outside of New York. He walked me through his fifteenth-century farmhouse over wide rugs in somber earth tones. He introduced me to his friend Walter, a retired artist and entrepreneur. They had arrived from America the night before.

We sat in couches by the fireplace to rest, eating hunks of parmesan cheese and drinking a local red wine. Olive wood burned a blue flame and warmed the hearth.

“You should know,” Walter told me, “that when Larry and I bought the house five years ago, we shined a light down into the cistern and saw goldfish swimming down there. That's the only fish I've seen in Tuscany since we started coming here, but I'm no authority.”

“Well, if you can't catch the goldfish,” Larry suggested, “we can go visit the eel pots down at Lake Trasimeno; the Italians are crazy about eels.”

I took a walk in the early evening down the side of the hill below the house. The tall cypress were almost black against a platinum sky, like sleek dark fishes pursuing the stars. The distant hills were dry, and still bathed in a hint of roseate light from the setting sun.

The next morning, Christmas morning, was bright and clear and the distant hills were a soft violet color. Larry, Walter, and I piled into a Fiat and drove to Lake Trasimeno to go fishing. There was a pier on the lake from which we could see where the fishermen had set their eel pots. The traps were marked by tall sticks that protruded from the milky blue water.

“The eel is a traveler,” Larry proclaimed. “You know they spawn in the Sargasso Sea and the young come up the freshwater rivers, even to this little lake in Tuscany, just like they do up the Hudson in New York.”

I was casting a small minnowlike lure into the lake when a man driving by on the road stopped his old Land Rover and joined us by slow steps at the lake's edge. He was wearing a jacket and tie.

“You're casting in a good spot,” he said, “most of the lake is shallow but here it is
multo profundo.
Let the lure sink and bring it in slowly and maybe you will catch a pike.
Piano, piano,
” he repeated softly. I reeled in my line and watched the lure flash and flutter in the water. Then I cast out again, cranking the reel handle more slowly.

“Piano.”
He pushed his hands down in the air as if he were testing the softness of a pillow.

On the morning of St. Stephen's Day, the day following Christmas, I took an early walk to the village of Santa Anna and a small church there locally famous for its frescoes. The rolling hills were quiet and blanketed by a light frost. Were it not for the sounds of distant gunshots, I would have thought Tuscany was still asleep. The reports were so distinct it seemed as though you could follow them with your eyes across the smooth hills.

Then I saw a hunter crawling out of an old Land Rover, slipping with his dog into a pocket of brush in the open countryside. He wore a green waxed jacket, wool pants, and leather boots. Others plodded across the hillside shouldering their guns, making straight tracks through the soft, newly tilled clayish soil, while their spaniels, limber
and amber eyed, crisscrossed the countryside intent on the smells of game in the still air.

Toward midmorning the frost was all but gone, lingering only in the shadows of houses and barns. Finding that the church with the frescoes was closed, I returned to the house for lunch.

Larry and Walter had prepared a big ham, which they had carried from New York. The smell of the baking pig filled the brick-arched interior of the old house. We ate more
pici
with melted pecorino cheese and swilled more Tuscan wine with an arugula salad sprinkled with black truffle oil.

Larry said, knowing I was leaving the next morning for Paris, “Your last chance for a fish in Tuscany is the goldfish in the cistern. Shall we try for him?”

I explained to Larry that it wasn't the kind of fishing I normally did, but it was a worthy exercise and I might as well try. He had found the key to the cistern top and, before I had my rod rigged with a hook and a small bit of ham, he had unlocked it and was staring into the dark black hole.

“Try a bigger piece,” Larry suggested, watching me bait my hook. “I remember it being a pretty big goldfish.” I lowered the line into the water and left the rod while we went inside to warm up by the fire.

We sat by the fire for a while and I talked about where I planned to go when the weather improved the next summer. Larry offered no opinions or suggestions; he just listened.

“Let's go see how the line is,” he began, after a while, so we went out to the cistern. I picked up my rod to reel in the line and, to my surprise, something was pulling at the other end. I lifted the tip of the rod and watched it tick as the fish swam in tight circles. I put the rod down and took the line in my hand, pulling a sleek black fish from the water. It was an eel.

As I looked down into the cistern, there was enough light from a lamp on the house for me to see my reflection in the bottom. It was like looking into the round hole of the Pantheon's ceiling and seeing
your reflection in the sky. I asked Larry how he thought an eel had ever got in there. “I don't know,” he said. “I'm just your editor.”

The next day when I left, he gave me a book of poems by Eugenio Montale.

“There's a famous one about eels,” he said.

W
HAT
I
SA
F
ISH
?

M
y father's heroes were seduced into learning by a curiosity about the natural world, and he described the ongoing process of that seduction as a person's
loucura
(Portuguese for craziness). Darwin's was beetles, Nabokov's butterflies, Audubon's birds. As a child in Brazil my father fell in love with birds, and birding continued to be his raison d'être in New York, where he grew up, married, and had children, and in Connecticut, where he divorced.

You are lucky to have one too, my father said. Yours is fish.

When in its element, the fish is seen by us in glimpses—an impression of fins and scales gliding over coral, a flash of silver and blue emerging from the depths of the ocean, materializing from the gravel at the bottom of a mountain brook.

Fish are also the creatures, some say, from which we have evolved. The limbed lungfish has been left along the evolutionary line as some clue of our connection to life in a primordial soup. We ourselves are nurtured, fishlike, in fluid before we breathe air, and are constructed largely of the medium within which fish play.

Fish are both the object of human fantasy—the mermaid, half golden locks and breasts, half scales and tail—and the representation of the sublime and horrifying, the white leviathan of Ahab's mono
mania. For Far Eastern peoples, the fish is the symbol of peace and order, strength and perseverance. It inhabits Japanese Zen garden pools. It is the meal of good fortune on the Chinese New Year, the auspicious symbol of boys' day in Japan, the representation of the eye for Tibetan Buddhists. The fish is holy for Jews on Passover, the early symbol of Christianity, the miracle of Jesus, the food that bestows immortal life, the Friday dinner. It is Pisces, the twelfth sign of the zodiac, which denotes the end of the astrological year and also the beginning.

The dual aspects of the fish as both a monster-seducer and a symbol of goodness and immortality have fascinated psychoanalytic minds. Fishes, Carl Jung writes, are said to be “ambitious, libidinous, voracious, avaricious, lascivious—in short, an emblem of the vanity of the world and of earthly pleasures,” but they are also a symbol of “Messianic significance,” and of “devoutness to religion.”

In a Boeotian vase painting the “lady of the beasts” is shown with a fish between her legs, or in her body. In drawings of the Japanese artist Hokusai, an octopus makes love to a woman. In ancient Chinese erotica, the penis entering the vagina is sometimes described as a loach (a small bottom-feeding fish) burrowing in the mud. A passage in Günter Grass's novel
The Tin Drum
describes a woman taking pleasure with a live eel. In ancient Rome a mullet was sometimes inserted into a woman's vagina as punishment for adultery.

In fifth-century China, flatfishes, which have both eyes on the same side of the body, were thought to represent both the male and female, the male on the left side, the female on the right. Consequently, in order to see in both directions, these fishes had to swim together always, side by side. Thus, they became a symbol of marital love.

We cannot account for why exactly it is that we are drawn to fish; perhaps it is as Hermann Hesse says in his novel
Narcissus and Goldmund:

P
ARIS

M
y train to Paris left from Florence. It passed through the mountains in the dark and, come morning, along the blue-green Côte d'Azur where palm trees grew. I saw men in a boat dropping nets and men with fishing rods casting from rocky breakwaters.

I was thinking about Yannid and meeting an extraordinary fisherman I had heard of but not met, Pierre Affre. Whether I would spend the winter alone or with friends depended on my success in cultivating relationships with these two.

I arrived at the Gare de Lyon and settled into a hotel on rue de Caumartin not far from l'Opera. Then I phoned Yannid at her apartment in Rouen.

“
Allo?
” she greeted in her soft voice.

“Yannid, it's James.” I hoped she would remember her promise, our planned meeting. “I didn't expect to get you,” I said. “How are you? I'm in Paris.”

“I'm fine. You're already here?”

“You're not going to Belgium with your mom?”

“I was too busy to go,” she explained. “I'm not going to Paris for the New Year either, I've got to stay here and study. I'm sorry if you planned on my joining you.”

“No, it's no big deal.” I felt my words were awkward. “I'm in a hotel. I'd like to see you.”

“I agree that New Year's is no big deal.”

“But maybe I can see you later this week.”

“I was thinking we could go to an art show at the Grand Palais. I've been wanting to see it, of Chinese art. I could come in tomorrow and you could meet me there.”

“Why don't you meet me at my hotel,” I suggested. “I'm on rue Caumartin, near the Opera.”

“Okay, that's fine. I suppose I need a break from work.”

 

Yannid arrived by train at Gare Saint-Lazare from Rouen at noon the next day. I was waiting for her in the hotel lobby when she walked in from the cold and damp day.

She held herself with an air of propriety and carried a backpack that looked to be heavy with books. She insisted on taking it with us as we walked to the Grand Palais.

“I come from one of those old Norman families you read about in Flaubert,” she told me as we sauntered along the quai. “My mother lives in a big apartment with a view of the cathedral; it's beautiful.” She looked at me and seemed to acknowledge an attraction between us. “You have to come see it.” We were getting along, just walking through Paris together, getting lost and somehow always ending up by the river again, which looked high and powerful. She liked to talk about art and books.

 

It was a cool Saturday morning when, several days later, I made the trip by train to Rouen to see her. The medieval city was also on the river Seine but downstream of Paris and closer to the sea. Yannid picked me up at the station in her mother's Citroën. I was shocked by the paleness and luminosity of her face; she looked as if she hadn't slept for days, but I found her slight and sickly appearance strangely beautiful.

“I feel,” she told me, “that Normandy is like Connecticut. You'll see the resemblance when we get out into the countryside.”

Yannid had told her mother that I would be staying with her in her small apartment. “This is a big deal,” she did not fail to tell me, “my mother is very…Catholic. She seemed okay with it, though, which kind of scares me. She's given me freedom to do what I want. I guess I'm an adult now, but I find that a bit fearful.”

We drove to the little street where Yannid lived, rue Eau de Robec. In medieval times Eau de Robec was a drapery and linen manufacturing center and the little stream that ran through it, the
eau,
or water, of Robec, was said to change color with the dyes that were discarded in it (this is described in the opening of
Madame Bovary
). The water, fed by a spring, now ran clear over pavement and pebbles, and the street was no longer lined with linen manufacturers but with sex shops and cafés.

Yannid stopped in the narrow stone street and opened a nondescript metal door. We walked into a dark corridor and up five flights of narrow spiral stairs. Her apartment was in an eighteenth-century building, and was in a kind of attic or aerie—there was a kitchen, bathroom, and a room with a bed, a couch, and two desks. The room's untidy appearance did not distract me from seeing its crowning virtue, a view of the large rose window of a gorgeous church, gigantic as the moon appears when it is near the horizon. The church's name was Saint-Ouen and it seemed so close you could put your hand through the rose window as though it were a pool of water.

“I couldn't live without this view.” Yannid nonchalantly opened the windows. “I couldn't study without it. I mean that, it's my sanity.”

I looked out over the sun-drenched slate-colored rooftops to the church and its rose window that was mesmerizing me. Now with the light fading behind passing clouds it looked more like a purple pool of water, almost, with fishes leaping out of it. “I can't wait to
get out of here. Put your stuff down,” she demanded, “and let's go to the beach. I love the water.”