The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (16 page)

 

La Vie des Océans, de Leur Naissance à Leur Disparition

par Yves Lancelot

 

and

 

Quand les Sciences Dialoguent avec la Métaphysique

par Pascal Charbonnat

 

Oh, the lives of oceans, their births and their deaths! And—oh, again—when the sciences do have their dreamy and extendedly spirited dialogues with the metaphysical!

The evening smells somehow sweetly of the summer warmth cut by a tinge of thick, lingering exhaust, despite what the Parisian authorities claim to be their cleaning up of the city's air—a good smell, nevertheless, because it
is
the smell of Paris and always pleasant.

And where it all gets strangest, and best, is at that small café, the one I previously spoke of, a block beyond the bookshop and at the corner of Rue d'Alsace and Rue des Deux Gares. Rue des Deux Gares is a nondescript little connecting street thick with more of the blue-on-white lit plastic signs saying
HOTEL
, and it leads at an angle to the nearby Gare du Nord, the other of the two railroad stations the street's name pays tribute to. In its own appellation, the café is also perfectly suitable, because dull gold letters on the tattered red awning out front do announce it as “Au Train de Vie,” meaning in this case not just the idiomatic French term for “lifestyle” but nothing less than—with a crisp pun when taken literally—“the train of life,” all right. In some long-gone hope of rendering it right for the location, probably back in the '60s or '70s from the looks of it, somebody apparently decided to give this everyday working-class café/brasserie a thoroughly railroad motif. The doors at the corner remain open to the sidewalk, and with yellowing lace half curtains hung from tarnished brass rods in the row of street-side windows, you're able to look above them and inside, past a grimy flower-print tile floor, to see how the bar, short, is studded with the cluster of actual headlamps from a long-forgotten streamlined train, all clear- or red-glass concentric lenses and polished chrome; on a high shelf on the far wall, above framed black-and-white photos of once-modern diesel locomotives and wagons-lits, is an extensive collection of moth-eaten conductor's caps, side by side. The finishing, and maybe most appreciated, touch of all is how the few tables for the dining area along the windows on the Rue des Deux Gares side use those salvaged Pullman-car seats, the artifacts also previously mentioned and lumpily upholstered in mustard-yellow faux leather trimmed with blue piping, the armrests the same dark blue. And to make everything even more right, on the narrow cracked sidewalk out front, instead of having the standard variety of café
terrasse
setup, small chairs and tables, they have arranged there—facing the low stone wall across the street and overlooking the open railway yards and with the huge, huge Paris sky beyond often igniting in such very unreal colors—more of the coach seats and wobbly low wooden tables set between them. Which means that in the early evening after so much walking, you
can
end up there, you
can
ease into one of the old oversize seats with the springs poking out here and there, you
can
sit down and order from the leathery-faced waiter—who doesn't wear any waiter's outfit and could be just another working-class guy doing this after a day on another job—a single strong black
café express
for a euro and a half, as brought to you in a white demitasse rattling on a white saucer, the waiter taking a little time to rearrange the couple of sugar cubes on the side of the saucer along with the single spoon after he sets the coffee down for you, “Monsieur,” and you
can
sit there, for me that place where I had to be—almost comically named the “train of life,” but, as emphasized, so appropriate for it, too—and take in the scene, enjoy the ride, if you will.

Or to put it another way, you do get on board again for a soothing and even transcendent silent excursion into the evening, as everything else seems to vanish—because remember Borges and Aragon and what happened to them when they found themselves in places where they needed to be, where a voice perhaps told them to go, also think of the general mind-set of another city wanderer, the poet Pessoa, a validly mysterious quotation from whom I attached to my writing here right at the start as an epigraph, which suggests the mood of this state as well—and in that seat, sipping the coffee, not even realizing how long it is you stay there, the many sadnesses you might have with you in the world seem to ease up, fall into proper perspective—like that of my friend paralyzed and perpetually watching CNN Europe in L'Hôpital Fernand-Widal, or that regarding my nephew, whom I didn't know well enough, and due to some drifting apart in our family, I had, rather stupidly, let time pass without getting to know him better, a sweet kid, so special that he actually worried if he had done the right thing in picking up a worthless souvenir trinket when the ragged boys peddling them fled the cops—and there you are above it all, flying along, traveling under the wide sky on a Pullman-car seat outdoors in the balmy evening of the 10th Arrondissement and at a café called—please don't laugh when I repeat it again—Au Train de Vie—entering into a calming state of mind deeper and more meaningful than life but still completely amazed at the whole very wonderful journey of it, life, too.

 

And that is where I would go, where I had to be on those many summer evenings. And there I seemed to encounter my own moment of timelessness, and there I wasn't fully sure where I was, but I realized I was somewhere that made me more sure of where I was than any other place I knew (something like this had happened to me other times in traveling, my returning, repeatedly and half somnambulistically, to a small whitewashed stone church on a high cliff beside the sparkling aqua ocean during a stay in Rio de Janeiro, also my returning again and again to get pleasantly lost in the maze of the old jewelry-market district of Hyderabad in India, with sacred cows grazing in the littered streets and the welcome full explosion of smells and color and noise that is any marketplace in India), and if maybe all of one's time on this planet does seem little more than an insubstantial dream, this experience offered transport into something larger, going beyond the dream and clear into what could be a dream about the dream itself, free of the ties of reality at last and laced with calm and understanding beyond understanding—truer than true.

 

On my last evening in Paris, before I was to fly out the next day, I had everything packed up back at the apartment and the place painstakingly cleaned, which I hoped the owner, my friend the Saul Bellow scholar's elderly Oncle Robert, would approve of if he ever showed up from Cannes. That done, I went to Rue d'Alsace again, or more exactly, ended up there yet again.

I knew had accomplished what I had to accomplish on the manuscript. I'd worked especially hard on it the past week or so, my overall performance ultimately not disappointing, I hoped, the taxpayers of the state of Texas, the people who funded my university and therefore my grant. I now sat outside at Au Train de Vie for close to an hour. I'm not sure that the sense of being beyond everything, almost in another, more significant realm entirely, quite set in on this final evening as I plunked a sugar cube into the coffee, stirred the rich black essence with the stubby spoon. And the sadness I experienced now was not in thinking about those troubling matters I had to face in Paris that summer, the large issues, because in truth most of that I had come to terms with the best I could; I did reach understanding. (My nephew, back in Rhode Island, wrote me excited e-mails about how great the trip had been for him, even said that he was tossing the original idea for the screenplay he'd been working on for his course and now was starting a completely different screenplay, less contrived, about a guy his age who plays prep school hockey, not very well, going to Paris to visit his screwy uncle and embarking on concocted adventures with some even screwier Australian kids; he wanted my input on the new scenario he had come up with, saying that the most valuable thing anybody had ever told him about writing was exactly what I had said to him, emphasizing that he should write about what he knew; his thanking me in the e-mails made me feel good. The sister and brother-in-law of my friend in the hospital finally had everything approved and in order, so that he could, in fact, be moved from Paris to Nantes, where they lived, and visiting him for a final time at Fernand-Widal a couple of days before, with the bed sheets and the hospital gown he was wearing now both a pale yellow, despite the room being off the quiet, empty corridor of Secteur Bleu, I entered to see him smiling in the sunshine pouring through that window he sat beside; he appeared nothing short of radiant amid so much yellow, telling me in his difficult speech, smiling more, how he looked forward to soon being near his relatives, who, as it currently stood, got to take the train to visit him here in Paris only once a month; I think I was taken by his optimism in the course of such personal disaster, our parting handshake eventually exchanged with both of us knowing we most likely would never see each other again, but still, there would always be for me this show of his sheer winning outlook, or unmitigated bravery—and that, too, made me feel good.) No, the current sadness now was more mildly mundane, and it existed, predictably enough, in my realizing that I would miss this spot I had often come to. I'd really miss being in Paris as well, where I had spent much of my life over the last 25 years and where I had many close friends to talk with about literature—good, enlightening conversation and definitely much more of that sort of thing than I had with so-called academic colleagues at my supposed home in Texas (where, if truth be known, I simply had moved for a job years before, and to me Texas never felt anywhere near being what one might call home). I had the pocket notebook with a red marbleized cover and a Bic pen laid out on the wobbly table. In between sips and looking up to that huge sky again—travelers with roller luggage walking by now and then, heading to or coming from the Gare de l'Est—I jotted some notes about the details of the scene there on Rue d'Alsace, probably knowing already that I would be writing an essay like the one you're reading now (several days ago I was told in an e-mail that the café, thoroughly funky and authentic when I had been there, has undergone some rather clinical, and most unfortunate, extensive remodeling), and I guess that I was just feeling a little lost suddenly and also pretty tired, physically so.

I mean, I'd had only a few hours' sleep the night before due to anxiousness, worry about getting the apartment cleaned and making sure I had taken care of everything I had to take care of in Paris (including a complicated session that day to close out a French checking account I'd kept for years), and I knew that even the walk back to Rue Saint-Martin would be somewhat of a chore at this stage, seeing that I had to be up early to get out to the airport the next morning.

Leaving the café, I nodded to the wiry guy in a faded polo shirt and jeans who was the waiter. He had come to expect me in the evening, I suppose, and he nodded back to me, “Monsieur,” then I started back down one side of the twin sets of winding steps beside the Gare de l'Est. I told myself that I shouldn't have lingered at the café as long as I had: there were still some last phone calls to make to French friends that evening, and it was already getting late, the sun having set. But then—weary, as said, also pressed for time—I remembered I had my trump card, and a literal card it was. You see, in Austin a young French woman who was there for the summer doing research at the university's rare books and manuscript library had lent me for the summer her card for those free bicycles they have in Paris now. The system is called Vélib', a fabricated catchword more or less translating as, indeed, “free bicycles,” and all over the city there are long racks of the matching things, sturdy beige-colored three-speeds, each with a generator light and a copious chrome basket on the front handlebars, waiting there for anybody who does subscribe to pay the deposit initially required and then the nominal annual fee to get a rider's card good for the year; the young woman—a genuinely brilliant professor of modern British lit at her French university, somebody I always greatly enjoyed discussing books with—certainly had subscribed, and I'd been using the handy mode of transport often that summer.

 

In front of the Gare de l'Est, at that cobblestone plaza, was a full supply of Vélib' bicycles, the little lights of the repeated stubby terminal stands for them in the long rack lit to make an extended row of green dots—jewel-like, intensely glowing—in the evening, which was a rich Wedgwood blue now and almost dark.

I walked up to the rack, felt the tires on one bicycle that didn't feel quite solid enough, then felt the tires on another, just right. I swiped my electronic card across the button-size green light at the low terminal post for the bicycle selected, to hear the buzz and clicking sound of the mechanism unlocking—I tugged the bike free. I put the card back in my wallet, slipped the wallet into the pocket of my black jeans, also pushed to the elbow the sleeves of the open-collar striped dress shirt I was wearing. I adjusted the saddle seat up a few notches for my height and swung my leg over it, squeezed the aluminum levers on the handle grips once or twice to test the brakes, too.

And then I got on and headed back down the slope of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, aiming right toward the Porte Saint-Martin arch and my apartment there, the old buildings flickering by, my knowing maybe more than ever that it probably wouldn't be long before I would again hear that voice you do hear when traveling, in some other place, at some other time—again I would come close to understanding that particular something, which is so big and important because it
is
well beyond simple comprehension.