My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (23 page)

While he was thinking, a heavyset blind man from Guadeloupe eased his way through the doorway, folded up his cane, leaned on the counter, and asked Hervé to put on something by the popular young band Zouk Station. Hervé found the album, split the shrink-wrap with a two-euro coin, and put it on. The blind man smiled and said he would buy it. Two elderly women walking past with groceries, their baguettes sticking up like exclamation points, glanced in anxiously as they moved through the blast of Zouk Station. A red-cheeked drunk zigzagged across the rue des Plantes toward the music, rolled through the door, and came to rest against the counter. Just then, the man who was thinking about calling Martinique realized that it was four in the morning in the Caribbean, so he told Hervé he would take two Santa Rosa albums. As he was paying, a cab pulled onto the sidewalk in front of Afric’ Music, and a compact old man from Togo wearing a newsboy cap and a bomber jacket got out of the driver’s seat, walked into the store, headed for the rack marked “Congo,” ran his hands up and down the CDs, and said, “Franco! Oh, oh, Franco!” After a moment, he walked back out of the store, got into his cab, and drove away.

“He likes Franco,” Hervé said.

The Cameroonian lawyer had chosen five albums and wanted more. Hervé removed the previous selection and blasted Fara Fara. The lawyer did a two-step, a tango move, and then shook his head. Off with Fara Fara. On with the new CD by Wenge Musica. The song had a galloping bass line and a bright, chattering guitar, and soon the lawyer was doing a modified cha-cha and Hervé was smiling, beating a tattoo on the counter. The sound was huge, pushing out of the little store and ballooning onto the Paris sidewalk, where the businesspeople and the shop clerks of Montparnasse were striding by in the dull autumn sunlight, smoking and talking on their way to lunch. As the song reached its crescendo, a man from Ivory Coast stepped into the store, slapped Hervé on the back, pulled out his cellphone, called a friend, and, when his friend answered, said simply, “Hey. I’m here.”

Like Waters and
Chocolate Pancakes

The lame and the halt come to Héviz. The arthritic, the rheumatoid, and the spinally challenged come, too, and those with gout, with sore gums, and with the nonspecific but acute craving to be young. They come to the little round lake in the middle of Hungary and strap on inflatable water wings or squeeze an inner tube under their arms and then float for hours, as motionless as lily pads, waiting for Héviz to work. The water in the lake is warm and glassy blue. It comes from a spring deep in the earth and supposedly contains minerals and radioactivity with healing powers. Nothing happens when you touch it, except that you start to smell a little like an egg-salad sandwich.

When my mother and I went to Héviz recently, I told her that I wasn’t sure I believed the thermal waters there could do anything, and a man overhearing me poked my mother in the ribs and said, “Wait and see, madam! You’ll look younger than your daughter when you get out!” This got me thinking. If my mother was going to end up looking younger than me, I wondered what I would end up looking like. What if my mother went in and I didn’t, and then we ended up looking the same age, like those indistinguishable mothers and daughters in the old Breck commercials? Nobody at the lake looked young or perky, but maybe they were, like, two hundred years old, in which case they looked great!

But that made me think of something else: Exactly how many years would the lake take off your age? I wanted to know this because I’m not
that
old, and I didn’t want the Héviz waters to send me back to my teenage years, because they weren’t that enjoyable. Unfortunately, no one at the lake could tell me how long to stay in the lake in order to rejuvenate myself to a specific age that I liked a lot. It’s probably more like cooking a turkey, where you have guidelines, but in the end you have to rely on instinct and touch and what time you need to get dinner on the table. I also think you aren’t supposed to come here worrying about such things. You come to Héviz to bob around in the hot pond and luxuriate in knowing that whatever ails you will be cured.

If you are Hungarian and have a note from your doctor, you can come to Héviz and stay in the square brick hostels in the park that surrounds the lake. Everybody else stays in hotels and guesthouses on the hills that rise up beyond the park. The visitors appear to be approximately one hundred percent German or Austrian, with the occasional Swiss. The parking lot of our hotel, the Danubius Thermal Hotel Aqua, was filled with late-model white Mercedeses lined up in a long, shiny row like a mouthful of molars. The new houses nearby are painted cocoa brown and have projecting eaves and window boxes and pierced woodwork along their balconies, in the style of an alpine chalet. In Héviz, there are German sausage stands and prices posted in German denominations. There are even a few teenage German greasers with pierced ears and round-toed leather boots and Metallica T-shirts. Perhaps they were actually middle-aged businessmen from Frankfurt who had spent a lot of time in the lake. The number of Germans here caught me by surprise, although I’d heard that families scattered in East and West Germany used to reunite during vacations in this part of Hungary, because it was almost neutral ground.

The Thermal Hotel Aqua is on one of those hills above the lake; it is a newish building with clean lines that could house an insurance company in a Midwest office park. The big indoor pool is filled with water pumped out of the lake. Everyone walks around in fluffy white robes and rubber thongs. People at the Thermal Hotel Aqua look a little glossy all the time, which might be from soaking in the radioactive water or from starting their days at the breakfast buffet, which includes two kinds of hot dogs and chocolate cake. Health, of course, is a relative thing.

“What is your problem?” the doctor asked me when I went in for my required initial consultation. I said I had come just to relax at the spa and see if there was something special about the Héviz water. “I understand,” he said, tapping his mustache with the end of his pencil. “I’ll put down ‘recreation’ for your diagnosis.”

He wrote for a moment on a little chart on his desk and then handed it to me. On the front was a list of the baths he recommended—two twenty-minute sessions each day in the thermal pool, one electric compartment bath, one underwater massage. On the back of the chart there were printed outlines of bodies; he had scribbled wiggly lines on them to indicate where he wanted me massaged and mud packed. I liked the sound of the carbonic acid bath and the infrared treatment, but he shook his head and said those were for people with joint and bone problems. We then talked for a moment about the Gundel’s nut-and-chocolate-filled pancakes I’d had at dinner the night before.

I realized then that the Héviz canon is that you come and get cured of your aches and pains and then get younger and younger; once you plateau at whatever age you’re going to regress to, you go and eat a lot of hot dogs and chocolate cake and loll around. Exercise here is something you sign up and pay for; it’s called “gymnastic,” it’s listed as a therapy on the hotel price list, and unless the doctor prescribed it for you, you don’t have to do it.

I was thinking about this one afternoon, while I dangled from a sort of traction device at the deep end of the thermal pool. I had huge lead weights around my ankles that made my legs hang heavily, pulling my torso down while I was suspended from a contraption with bars and hooks that was wedged under my arms. This is called “subaquale traction” and is recommended for, among other things, “congenital or acquired disturbances of motion.” I felt really tall while I was hanging there, but once the trainer fished me out and unbuckled the weights, I shrank back to my normal height. Then I went and got massaged by a Hungarian valley girl, who was snapping her gum and listening to a radio station playing Tom Jones singing “Delilah” while she worked on me. At the same time, she was carrying on a conversation with another masseuse, who was on the other side of a muslin curtain and slapping around another pasty tourist. I rather liked the no-nonsense style of the massage: nothing mystical, nothing spiritual, no need to gaze up at the masseuse when she finished and mutter something about how in touch I felt with my energy, which is what I usually feel obligated to do whenever I get a massage from a post-hippie body works expert here in the United States.

So, does the water work? The Romans were the first to come to Héviz and float around in the pond, and then the Hungarians, and then, apparently, the Germans and Austrians and Swiss. My mother, after a few soaks, still looked like my mother, but I confess I felt younger every day I stayed around the lake. If you walk at even a decent clip, you fly by everyone who is shuffling toward Lake Héviz. When I went running, I felt Olympian. One afternoon, I ran through town, past those cocoa-colored alpine cottages and the tour buses from Munich, and a little girl scampered after me and then smacked me on the butt. I guess if I looked spankable to a four-year-old, something must have happened. It was our last day in Héviz. I cut my run short, went back to the hotel, ate more chocolate pancakes, and jumped into the pool.

Shooting Party

When I went to Scotland for a friend’s wedding last summer, I didn’t plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn’t expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I don’t know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didn’t want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along.

We were not outfitted like an Edwardian shooting party. One woman was in a denim minidress with red, white, and blue platform shoes. Another was wearing pedal pushers and wobbly pumps. I was in something lightweight and was tripping around in rubber flip-flops. The caretaker must have been horrified by the sight of us. He had small dark eyes and a tragic manner and was wearing a proper field jacket with suede patches in the right places. He handled his gun with a wary tenderness, as if it were a baby alligator; it was about the size of one, with a double barrel and a thick wooden stock. None of us had ever done this before. We were gunless, gun-fearing city people, writers and filmmakers and art historians—sissies, in fact, who cringed when the caretaker raised the shotgun, wordlessly indicating that it was time to begin. He muttered a few instructions, then held out the gun, waiting. No one stepped up. After a moment, we turned on the bridegroom and shoved him forward.

It was just one of those things—dumb luck, probably—but the bridegroom had perfect aim, and he exploded the clay pigeon into a million pieces. The caretaker nodded and released another pigeon, and again the groom hit the target. It was inspiring. We all crowded up to take our turns. The guest in platform shoes went next and missed by a mile. An usher in Ray-Bans winged a few. One bridesmaid had perfect form but a hot finger on the trigger. Finally, it was my turn. I hadn’t expected to like the feel of the gun, but I did: It was warm and smooth and knee-bucklingly heavy, with two triggers that were set so far apart that they might have been fitted for a giant’s hand span. The caretaker sized me up and then spoke quietly. “You want to hold it as tight against your shoulder as you can,” he said. “It has a very powerful recoil.”

I squeezed the gun against my body.

“Tighter,” he said.

“That’s as tight as I can get it.”

“A little tighter.”

I have never been kicked by a mule, so I can only imagine that it would feel a little like the gun slamming into me after I fired. My teeth rattled, and my head rang like a school bell. I was hysterically excited, as breathless and thrilled as if I’d just robbed a bank. Having missed, I begged for another shot. The caretaker released another pigeon, and I followed it, my arm aching from the weight of the gun and the shock of the recoil. I missed again, but I was close. The second recoil was just as bad as the first. I shot again and again and again, sending not a single clay pigeon to its reward but each time getting closer. Me! Firing a double-barreled shotgun! And I couldn’t stop! The caretaker was egging me on, murmuring that if I had a gun that fit me properly, I’d be hitting everything.

I didn’t stop until the groom pointed out that we were being charged about a pound sterling per shot and that at the rate I was going he wouldn’t be able to afford a honeymoon. Shooting enchanted me; this is my sport, I thought. I wondered where in Manhattan I could go to fire a gun. The next morning—the day of the wedding—I woke up nearly unable to lift my arm. The bruise extended from my armpit to my elbow, and it was black and green and a deep imperial purple. I was wearing a sleeveless dress, as all the women in the wedding were, and they were all bruised to varying colors, depending on how enthusiastic they’d been about the sport. We considered covering our injuries with undereye concealer, but there was not enough to go around. Fortunately, single-malt Scotch was available in huge quantities, and by the end of the night we were showing off our bruises like tattoos.

Fertile Ground

The penises in Bhutan amazed me, there were so many of them. I didn’t see them right away when I arrived in the kingdom of Bhutan’s one airport, a narrow drive shaved into the Paro Valley’s shaggy green grass. I might not have noticed them anyway, because I was so woozy from the flight—the scariest one in regularly scheduled commercial aviation, mastered by fewer than a dozen pilots in the world, which requires a right-hand turn at Mount Everest and then a sort of swooning, tree-trimming slide through the high Himalayas to the airstrip. I was so preoccupied with making landfall that I didn’t take note of anything about the airport, really, not even the paintings of curly-tailed dragons and birds, whose beaks are curved like meat hooks, and blue poppies and auspicious Buddhist symbols—conch shells and endless knots and golden fish.