Friday 19 August 2011
Avignon, FRANCE
He had the same eyes, Nico. I would have recognized them anywhere. But his hair was blacker than I had remembered, and his Marseillais accent was thicker than I had realized when I knew him years ago. The nuances of language come only with fluency. I met him when I was nineteen and naïve, a virgin in every possible sense of the word. It was my first time in France. I wanted so desperately to fall in love.
We first met at Red Sky, or maybe O’Neill’s, peu importe. It doesn’t much matter. I was tipsy and happy and I wasn’t afraid of men yet, no, not then. I met Nico before the terror started, before I learned how to distrust, how to hate, how to fear. I was innocent when I met Nico. I trusted him. I trust him still.
We decided to meet up at Place Pie. It was only natural. He was in jeans, the back sneakers he always wore, a grey shirt that unbuttoned in a V at the neck, the white fedora that I used to playfully steal.
« Comme c’est bizarre de te revoir, » he said to me as he kissed my cheeks. Left right left.
He asked me right away about my novel, the hypothetical one that I promised him that I would write one day. He was sure that I had started it. I laughed and shook my head as we found a table on the terrace at Red Sky.
« Mais tu écris toujours j’espère . . . »
« Oui, t’inquiète pas. Et je te donnerai un exemplaire dès que mon boucan sort. Si jamais ça sort . . . si jamais j’en écris un qui vaut être publié . . . »
We ordered drinks in the afternoon heat and picked up where we had brutally left off, somewhere in the middle of the folly of the spring of 2009.
I have been doing aller-retours between France and the United States for so long now it seems that Avignon has become the France of my youth. A golden Virgin stands at the highest point of the lonely town, her hands clasped in prayer and her head ringed in a crown of stars. She looks out over Avignon—over its lavender, its cobblestones, its palace with its statues of headless saints, its cicadas, its olives, its wine, its river, its ramparts. It was Mother Mary that watched the madness of my youth. She watched as I broke into le Rocher des Doms with Thom; as I stumbled through Place Pie, weeping; as I lit cigarettes in the rain while walking home to Monclar; as I sat alone by the river, writing and inviting my fate. Avignon is a city where no one knows me deeply, where no one expects my voice on the telephone, where no one worries if I don’t call. When I wander at night, the beat of my boots echoes off of rampart walls. There is no sound more lonely than that of solitude. No one here asks me what I want to be when I grow up. Except Nico.
« Tu te souviens de cette soirée-là ? . . . celle où nous sommes rentrés chez toi—ou bref, chez Isabelle—et on n’a fait que causer pendant toute la nuit. Et le lendemain il m’a fallu m’enfouir dans le jardin pour que personne ne me voie . . . et il y’avait tous les gamins et Isabelle dans la cuisine cette matinée quand nous sommes descendues, tout doucement, en cachette. Et toit t’étais en train de me chuchoter et tout et j’avais trop peur moi qu’on ne nous découvre . . . »
One night two years ago he stayed the night at Isabelle’s house, secretly, in my bed, wrapped in my sheets that smelled like lavender. I will remember his eyes, always. He had taken off his thick, black-rimmed glasses and placed them on my nightstand, next to my morning cup of tea. We shouldn’t have risked it, no, not there. Shawna had refused to bring Levy home; instead they took a cab to Adrien’s apartment in Agroparc, near Montfavet. Levy had complained that the bed would be too small for the two of them, but it was Shawna that knew better. Our host mother was strict, temperamental, bipolar. I never should have suggested that Nico stay over. But I did. And we did nothing that night but lay in bed and stay up all night talking, I swear.
Two years ago, Nico was a police officer that wanted nothing better than to act, and I was a bilingual aspiring author who had always dreamed of painting. He said that he hadn’t wanted to let his father down. He had done for his son, sacrificed so much to get Nico where he was. Nico had entered the police academy to appease family tradition.
« Mais là où je suis aujourd’hui n’est pas là où je veux être demain. »
“Where I am today,” he said, “is not where I want to be tomorrow.”
« Et moi je veux écrire. Je vais écrire, à n’importe quel prix. »
“And I want to write. I will write, at whatever cost.”
Where I am today is never where I want to be tomorrow.
At twenty-one years, I suddenly feel old, fatigued. I have become nostalgic. I haunt the stumbling ground of my dangerous youth. I remember its caresses, its insults, its kisses, its violence. I remember running into the frigid waves at the beach at La Ciotat with Shawna, I remember the route to Apt in Alex’s car that always smelled like kif, I remember Adrien’s apartment in Agroparc where we drank vodka and picon, I remember sitting on a bench on Nico’s lap outside of La Cadillac and kissing him for the first time, I remember calling Levy from the airport in Marseille and crying while waiting to board a flight to London, I remember buying a long-stemmed zinnia, with red petals and a red ribbon to match, and leaving it in a vase on my desk at Isabelle’s as a final gesture, a gift, a goodbye.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
La solitude de la voyageuse
Saturday 13 August 2011
Nice, FRANCE
Summer in the city, and I’m so lonely, lonely, lonely. There is no solitude comparable to that of a suitcase, or watching the sunrise over the Mediterranean alone. I went to Antibes one Saturday just to rub up against strangers, I admit it. There was a white wedding parading out of the cathedral there, and the shower of rose petals and the lace and the cameras and the ochre of the steeple against the azure of the sea all left me close to tears. I have become sensible, unstable. The sight of the sea alone makes me cry.
I spent my Saturday afternoon in Antibes at the Picasso museum, housed in his old studio with tall uncurtained windows that overlooked the sea. I stood in the center of a gallery of his sketches and I felt him there. I did. In the mid-1940s Picasso’s mind was filled with fawns playing lutes and flutes, centaurs wielding tridents, big-hipped women stretched out on rocks like mermaids, or sometimes dancing, hands raised, breasts bared, eyes closed, hair flowing as wild as Medusa’s. I didn’t have the drugs to sort it out. I stood in the center of Picasso’s studio and looked out the window like he once did. The cloudless sky floated in the Mediterranean depths and a bright white cruise ship floated by in the sky.
The Mediterranean inspires a certain madness, not the cold madness of my winters, no, it is a warm madness, the madness of a girl alone on the sea; it is the folly of youth, of passion, of waves, of loneliness, of love, of sunlight so bright that it burns the sky to a bleached blue. It is a madness that I feel when I am home alone; when I cook couscous and vegetables and listen to Jimi Hendrix; when I walk the length of la Baie des Anges along the Promenade des Anglais late at night; when I open drawers and cupboards and closets just to see what’s inside; when I wander until I’m lost on a hill overlooking the bay; when I eat breakfast on the balcony with a view of the sea and feel so immensely overwhelmed by the beauty of my solitude.
Nice could be the saddest of all cities. It burns. Summer is its greatest tragedy.
I am mourning my departure in advance, as always. It’s my most morbid habit. Where has my time gone all of a sudden? What will I do with my body that stings with salt and sunshine once back in the aching fields of Ohio? My body is forbidden there. They judge me down to my bones.
Sometimes I am convinced that I won’t be buried there. I hope hibiscus will grow near my grave. I want an olive tree planted in my backyard. I want a courtyard with walls where ivy climbs. I want my gardens to be lined with lavender. I hope to hear cicadas outside my windows at night. I hope one day my children will want to see the country I came from. I want them to be bilingual, like me. I want to tell them the stories that my mother and my grandmother told me. I want to hold them and tell them “je t’aime.”
And if I never go home? If I abandon the work that I have started there? If I promise to my friends that I’ll write? If I sell my car and my furniture? If I pack my library of literature into a big box labeled “Anglophone” and store it in my closet until it’s dusty? I’d be no better off than before—adrift, aloof, alone. As for happy I cannot yet say. My greatest fear is that one day I’ll stop loving this country, that I’ll grow old with it no happier than I would have been elsewhere.
We ambiguously aspiring expatriates are a lonely bunch. We just don’t know where we belong. We’ve stretched the cord to the mother country but we haven’t quite severed it. We’re licking at our open wounds. We shop and drive and read and make love in a foreign tongue, but we will always count to ten and cuss in our native language until the day that we die.
* * *
The most beautiful day that I remember in Nice, it rained. It was cloudy in the morning, stifling, the humidity as high as the sky was low and the bus was late as usual. I listened to The National on the bus to school because I was lonely among people. It began drizzling by the time I got to school. Our grammar review of adverbial clauses and gerunds was punctuated by rain but by the time we paused for lunch the city was again whitewashed like an overexposed photograph. Painfully bright, le soleil brûlant, the ochre buildings of la Place Masséna standing like sunburned guards of the blinding sea surging beyond the Promenade des Anglais. But by mid-afternoon the clouds were back to menace the sky and I sat at the back of the bus with my book and my brain all clouded over by the newest novel by Nina Bouraoui.
Chez moi, I sat on the balcony to read. I didn’t notice the rain until I heard what I thought was the beat of soft percussion coming from the garden below, but it was just the rain tap tap tapping on a plastic gutter like a hollow African drum. The rain was sudden and claustrophobic. The mountains veiled themselves in fog and the sea disappeared into the horizon. Claps of thunder came from nowhere and everywhere all at once. A bolt of lightening over the water illuminated a hole in the sea and the thunder ricocheted off of the invisible mountains to the north like a boomerang. The palms drooped like weeping willow trees in the rain.
And then as subtly as it started, the tap tap tapping on the gutter slowed to a steady, lethargic beat. The smells returned all at once, wet, sensual, rich: sweet silver pine, hints of lavender, eucalyptus, hibiscus. The apricot and lemon trees in the garden glimmered with citrus gems. I could see the sea begin to move again, a sleeping giant groaning under a thin sheet, deep and dark and black and blue as a new bruise. The clouds lumbered out to sea like the ferries that depart for Corsica from the port and a rainbow took their place, a great arching gate to the fiery, forbidden continent across the salty belly of mother Mediterranean.
A cool breeze from the sea sighed with the scent of salt and the recent rain. The sky was clear all at once and from the balcony I watched a sailboat skirt the shore. Ever since the summer solstice—when I was still hundreds of kilometers away, isolated in the French Alps—the evening has been creeping up earlier and earlier, a sunlight thief. The shadows slink up the sides of the buildings, one story of balconies and awnings after another. There are more gardens on the balconies in this city than there are on the ground. On their balconies, my thousand anonymous neighbors grow orchids and morning glories. But I didn’t come to Nice to see gardens and parks; I wanted to stand at the edge of a continent and feel the waves around my ankles pulling me out to sea like watery manacles.
There is something about the Mediterranean that makes me fall in love with everything. After the rain that day I was drawn from my balcony and down to the sea. It was the color of slate, or a magnet, the color of the roof of my parents’ house, surging under the low clouds after the storm. As I walked along Rue Robert Latouche and down to the water I was fascinated by the flowers and the trees and all I wanted was to know what they were called. I wanted to name them all, to cultivate my own garden of Eden. I know that Paradise no longer exists because I admit that I am sometimes ashamed of my sex and because now I bleed on the moon’s schedule and not my own. But no angel or god could tell me not to eat from the tree of knowledge and taste its fruits of passion.
As I walked down to the shore I crushed leaves between my fingers as I pashed bushes along the sidewalk just to smell them. I ran my hands through the juniper bushes that spilled over the walls of the villas on the hill and I remember that their odor was sweet like the mountains yet salty like the sea.
I put my earbuds in because suddenly I felt all alone there on the street but I couldn’t stand the thin digital sound and I took them out again just to listen to the people around me speak. The tongues of the Mediterranean are too sweet to taste. The Italians sing when they speak. The French kiss when they meet. The Arabic of the Algerians and the Moroccans is as windswept and sunburned and infinite as the great shifting dunes south of the Atlas mountains.
That evening I was hungry I remember but I preferred the smell of salt after a sudden storm to a thin dinner of rice and zucchini. I am too poor to be living in the French Riviera, really, I know it, but the Mediterranean is gold every evening at sunset. The rocks where I sat that evening down by the shore felt alive. They had kept the heat of the sun long after the sky had lost its brilliant light and they warmed my palm when I touched them. On the rocky beach, people sat in little groups of two, three, four, with their umbrellas, their fishing rods, their picnic baskets, their beer. The children no longer ran the length of the beach, shrieking in the waves. It was the sitting hour. I sat and waited while the sun and the moon exchanged thrones. The round, powdered face of the full moon reigned the sky in royal blue and her King surveyed the western front beyond the horizon. The sun would soon disappear beyond the hills and the sunset would unfurl like a tapestry over the water. Twilight fell softly, almost reluctantly. With a ripple the surface of the water changed from silk to velvet, with the vast silence of the sea reposing in that rocking cradle of civilization.
There was a man sitting alone near the water that evening, I remember, his back was to me, his head was down. I always feel a certain solidarity with other solitary souls. I was tempted to go to him, to say hello, to join our two solitudes and make us one, but I didn’t disturb his silence. Solitude is as precious as a polished stone. And I am so alone here.
I watched the waves and I wanted them to caress me, to roll over me, to envelop me in their watery embrace. I watched the waves and I thought about desire, what it meant. I thought of the people that I had desired, and the few I had actually loved.
That night I dreamt of Romain, my landlord Josy’s son. He is older than me, but not by too much. He has a life in Paris and he says he likes it better there. I can’t understand why. Josy said that once Romain had a serious girlfriend and somehow that makes me jealous because I’ll never know him like she once did.
In my dream he came into my bedroom during the night and he watched me while I slept. Beneath my eyelids, I knew he was there. I kept my eyes closed but I let my lips twitch into the thin smile that good dreams always inspire. I imagined him watching me and wondering what dream had made me smile so. When I did open my eyes he was there in the doorway and he wasn’t embarrassed to have been watching me sleep, like a father who stands at the door of his baby daughter’s bedroom. He was bare-chested in my dream and stronger than I had remembered and his hair was wet and long around his ears. We didn’t speak but we went out together to walk along Avenue de la Lanterne in the dawn. We walked slowly, never talking, never touching, but close enough that we could feel each others’ heat and it was as though he were caressing me from all sides, holding me tightly like the waves embrace the shore.
He wasn’t there in the morning when I truly woke up alone in bed with the dawn. I never really know where he sleeps at night, perhaps at a girl’s place, in her bed, under her sheets, his arm around her waist and her hair on the pillow that they shared.
On that day in July with the rain, I didn’t return to the house until the sun was going down. It felt like a morning with a hangover. My head pounded with the waves. Children cried leaving the beach. Men watched me as I walk, like they always do. A group of students was walking down the street as I climbed the hill. There were seven of them and they made me upset, the way they clung to one another, they way they speak loudly in English, the way their hips swayed with alcohol. They must have been only a few years younger than me, two perhaps, no more than four, but I found their youth suddenly abrasive, ignorant.
No one was home. There are people that come and go here but this is a house that no one truly lives in. It can’t be. There is a vase of decorative umbrellas in the hall. The white leather couches have no dents. There are no towels in the bathroom. There are no streaks on the stove. There is a pile of antique baggage next to the door, like some ancient voyager is perpetually trying to leave but never quite succeeds. The boys come and go but they leave no fingerprints. My sheets are stretched so tightly across the bed that no crease or hollow proves that a body has slept there.
I’m not afraid of the silence. It excites me. It has a certain electric charge. It is filled with secrets. Josy says that her sons miss their father, that ever since the affair their family has been invaded by a void that now shrouds them and silences them. Two years ago, Josy’s husband was in a moto accident that left him paralyzed in a hospital bed for months. Several surgeries later, he ran away with his nurse. A bad soap opera drama. Josy says that Damien, the youngest son, misses his father the most, and he continues on like nothing ever happened. Roman, the eldest son, now hates his father, and refuses to speak to him, to acknowledge him, to respect him. I’m not sure how Audré feels.
I rarely see the boys, but I hear Damien sometimes when he comes home late at night. Josy says he has a wild side, something in his silence that troubles her. I hear him shuffling through the halls and closing the doors softly after him, like Josy always asks him to do. I hear the faucet in the bathroom, the flush of the toilet, the muffled tones of a phone conversation out on the balcony where he smokes a pétard. While his mother was away in Rennes for her July vacation, I would sometimes find Damien sitting alone in the white salon in the evenings, burning down a block of Moroccan kif to roll a joint. He doesn’t know that I know. Josy doesn't know either. He has a timid smile, Damien does, and short curly hair that frames his thin face, making him look younger than he is.
He used to be chubby, Josy told me. We were standing in the living room one night until well after midnight and she was showing me pictures of her beloved family, of her sons, of her daughter Audré and her fiancé. They can’t have children, and Audré sometimes hates her fiancé for it, for the fact that her finite life force that bleeds out with her every month.
Josy calls me ma puce, ma belle, ma chérie, ma coquinette. Out of the wounds of her divorce she shows affection for a stranger. Her adopted, fertile daughter. She is affectionate but her home is sterile. She asks that I wipe out the washing machine with a sponge after I use it so the excess water doesn’t get stagnant and musty. She provides a squeegee in the shower so the walls and doors don’t get streaks She asks that I empty the Nespresso machine after each use so the espresso capsules don’t stick. Her refrigerator is organized but nearly empty. She is never home for dinner. She unplugs all of her appliances after she uses them. She arranges my shoes in the hallway closet. She keeps all of her makeup evenly spaced on the shelf in her bathroom. I wonder what she is afraid of.
I look for evidence of life in this silent house like an archaeologist digs for bones in the dirt. Two toothbrushes in a tin cup on the sink. Two bottles of men’s cologne. Two skateboards lined up by the door. A pair of shoes on the balcony. A pair of pants set out on the back of a chair to dry. Open doors that used to be closed. Closed doors that used to be open. Lingering humidity on the shower door. A new roll of toilet paper. A fresh bar of soap. One less yogurt in the refrigerator. A box of sugar cubes left ajar. An ashtray on the counter. An empty dishwasher. I fabricate a false intimacy with the fleeting traces of their presence. I track their movements like ghosts. The clinking of keys in the hall. The sound of a scooter idling on the street.
It is the silence that drives me down to the shore. The sea belongs to the men at night, and I would not be safe there on the rocks, buffeted by the waves, but sometimes in the afternoons after class I would get off the bus five stops before Arcadia and walk to the Promenade that stretches along the sea. I open my book but the water is too blue to read. Men look at me as they pass behind me, I know they do. They stare at my neck, my shoulders, my thighs, my hair—not because they are particularly lovely, but because I am a woman alone. That’s all that matters. And sometimes, I admit it, I turn and look back at them. It excites me, not because I desire them—no, not their bodies, their thighs thick from soccer, their collarbones under their polos, their big hands that smell like cigarettes, their strong lips that bruise the soft skin on girls’ necks, their coarse hair—but because my gaze excites them in return. And I like to have that sense of control. I look just long enough to feel their eyes between my shoulder blades as they pass.
I look out over the water where low cumulous clouds collect on the horizon in the afternoons like a fleet of flagships lost at sea. On the rocky beach, bodies bronze, burn. I keep myself at a distance, always, but sometimes I want to reach out and touch their skin, let it warm my own. And sometimes I want sex like I want cigarettes, something strong to fill my empty, lonely spaces, to infiltrate my lungs, my deepest caverns. I have never been a smoker but sometimes I crave it, but only in the rain, in the evenings, on my balcony that overlooks the sea. And sometimes I just want to be close enough to smell a cigarette burning. But more than anything the thought of sex makes me feel lonely. Like a child who just wants to be held.
For now, France will be my lover. For now, I have Romain’s cologne on my wrist, stolen from the shelf in the bathroom just to see what it smelled like. He leaves for Paris tomorrow, Romain does. One less toothbrush. One less bottle of cologne. One less load of laundry drying on the line. One less backpack posed on the table. One less skateboard lying on the floor. One less pair of lungs breathing in the bedroom next door. A half-full ashtray, a half-smoked blunt, a bed with only one body, a pillow left unused.
He will take a train from Nice towards Marseille, skirting the Mediterranean, screaming past the graveyard industries of ugly Miramas, winding up through the barren Calanques and past Martigues and its canals and its pastel streets all lined with rowboats instead of cars, then north through dry Avignon and its fields of lavender and sunflowers long past their season, around Carpentras and its view of Mont Ventoux with its windy memories of Petrarch and his beloved Laura, through Lyon and over its bridges, past the stubborn castles that speckle the Loire valley, across the great bread belly of France, and finally to Paris, to the bright lights of the big city, a city that only exists in fashion magazines and romantic dreams, a city where people fuck and drink and smoke and shop and flaunt and maybe even fall in love, but where no one actually seems to live. Five hundred and seventy nine miles away from his first love, from his mother, from his brother, from his sister, from the sea, from me.
A key in the lock, a sudden urgency, a self-conscious fear of indecency. The rhythm of footsteps on the tile floor, not syncopated, he’s alone. He’ a shadow, a pair of pants drying on the laundry line, a door that mysteriously opens and closes, a bookshelf that tells me that sometimes he tries to cook, that he has explored Monaco, that he knows the French penal code upside-down and backwards, that he watches old films by Tarantino, that when he was young he listened to U2 and the Beatles, that he has a fleeting interest in French poetry and theater, that he visits le Louvre from time to time. He rolls his own cigarettes. He drives a scooter. He loves a woman, and he’s leaving her tomorrow.
* * *
This last week has been nothing but departures. It hums with goodbyes. I can see the airport from my balcony where I eat breakfast in the morning. It is situated just next to the sea, the runway built on a peninsula that juts out into the water. When the planes take off towards destinations as anonymous as their passengers, they bank out over the sea, the coastline opening up below like a great oyster with an ochre-red gem tucked inside. Sometimes in the afternoons after class, we would lie on the beach with our bellies to the sun and our toes buried in the rocks, and we would watch the planes come and go and try to guess where they were from, where they were going. I always imagined the row of portholes lining the side of the planes all filled with pale faces still eager for the sun, jealous of the waves, longing for the beat of the baked stones that replace the sand on the niçois shore.
Once Michelle and I swam out into the sea as far as we could, but I wanted to go even further into the waves, out to the yellow buoys that floated off in the distance, an unobtainable finish line to a race from which I knew I would never return. The salt wouldn’t keep me afloat forever. But I floated on my back with my eyes closed for as long as I could, letting myself be carried off by the current’s whims. When I opened my eyes the water was so blue that I wanted to cry. My face was so streaked with salt that no one would have known.
On that afternoon I remember that sitting on the beach behind us was une famille métissée—a white woman and a North African man and their beautiful, brown children. I watched them through my sunglasses. The woman was covered from head to toe, a towel balanced on her head to protect her face from the sunlight, a towel spread out over her legs, a thin white blouse covering her neck and shoulders. Her husband left her alone and sat on the edge of the shore, his feet and chest bare in the sunlight, his hair black, his back brown, his toes touching the water every time a wave rolled in. The children ran and shouted into the waves and out again, past their father and towards their mother. I watched them and wondered if they would have the same complexes as my beloved Nina Bouraoui, the tomboy daughter of an Algerian man and a French woman. Will their hearts and skin ache for the fiery shores of the North African coast? Will they ever learn Arabic? Will they remember the violence of their father’s own childhood? Will they be able to reconcile their métissage? Will they hold a grudge against the soil of their mother’s country? Will they care about neocolonialism? Will they eat couscous or duck? Will they ever hate their parents for their skin? Will they regret their childhood? Will they ache for their innocence? Or will their generation learn to accept them, to tolerate their parents’ love, to reconcile a violent colonial past? Somehow I doubt it. It means so much to know where home is.
Now that all of my classmates are gone—back to Milan, to Chicago, to Vienna, to Slovakia, to London—I walk and I walk and I walk. I wander until my shins hurt and my arches buckle. To Cannes, to Monaco, to Menton, to St. Paul de Vence, to Mont Baron. I roam like Rimbaud, shambling after some bohemia along Petrarch’s path across the south of France; like Rousseau, composing carnets full of confessions in his head as he wandered; like Woolf, haunting the alleys of London, from Westminster, past Buckingham Palace, through St. James Park, up to Regent’s Park and back again. I wander because I’m afraid to stay put, because my shadow gives me company, because I don’t know what else to do.
And what can I say of my wanderings? Only so much as a lonely traveler can say. Monaco is heartbreaking and immaculate, with untouchable lawns but touchable women for a certain price, full of Christian hypocrisy and palm trees and yachts. Cannes has real sand beaches, children with chins sticky with ice cream, a castle on a hill, a park with palms, a port, and a promenade, like all towns on the French Riviera. Menton’s hills are covered with villas and cemeteries, its buildings brilliant in a sun soaked pastel palette, its streets lined with orange trees. Antibes has an aura of Picasso, a harbor filled with foreign yachts, sea banks built up with boulders, a castle with consecutive weddings and a square perpetually covered with rice and rose petals, a market, and a public fountain where children splash and mothers watch. St. Paul de Vence is populated by hunchbacked white heads with eyes too recessed and fragile for the Mediterranean sun, wandering among galleries upon galleries where businessmen and women parade as artists with paintbrushes and unkept hair tucked behind their ears. Cimiez has a park filled with olive trees where monks wander and a hotel where Queen Victoria once stayed. And everywhere I wandered, the salty salty sea kept the whole coastline afloat, the great bulging belly of mother Mediterranean, cradling civilization along her violent and dazzling coast.
And what of Nice? A new postal code to add to my growing list of lovers. I loved the port the most, at night, alone, out along the embankment the whole way to the lighthouse, where the ferries to Corsica docked in the dark. The vast stillness of the water. The waves tugging at the dock like impatient children. The great watery inkwell where, if I jumped and held my breath, I could so quickly disappear, as quietly and beautifully as the Little Prince vanishing from the desert, in search of his sunset.
Je sais la tristesse du regard pour l’horizon, une ligne sans limites. Je sais l’impuissance. Je sais le désir, parfois, d’un autre pays, une illusion. La mer est une promesse.
Nice, FRANCE
Summer in the city, and I’m so lonely, lonely, lonely. There is no solitude comparable to that of a suitcase, or watching the sunrise over the Mediterranean alone. I went to Antibes one Saturday just to rub up against strangers, I admit it. There was a white wedding parading out of the cathedral there, and the shower of rose petals and the lace and the cameras and the ochre of the steeple against the azure of the sea all left me close to tears. I have become sensible, unstable. The sight of the sea alone makes me cry.
I spent my Saturday afternoon in Antibes at the Picasso museum, housed in his old studio with tall uncurtained windows that overlooked the sea. I stood in the center of a gallery of his sketches and I felt him there. I did. In the mid-1940s Picasso’s mind was filled with fawns playing lutes and flutes, centaurs wielding tridents, big-hipped women stretched out on rocks like mermaids, or sometimes dancing, hands raised, breasts bared, eyes closed, hair flowing as wild as Medusa’s. I didn’t have the drugs to sort it out. I stood in the center of Picasso’s studio and looked out the window like he once did. The cloudless sky floated in the Mediterranean depths and a bright white cruise ship floated by in the sky.
The Mediterranean inspires a certain madness, not the cold madness of my winters, no, it is a warm madness, the madness of a girl alone on the sea; it is the folly of youth, of passion, of waves, of loneliness, of love, of sunlight so bright that it burns the sky to a bleached blue. It is a madness that I feel when I am home alone; when I cook couscous and vegetables and listen to Jimi Hendrix; when I walk the length of la Baie des Anges along the Promenade des Anglais late at night; when I open drawers and cupboards and closets just to see what’s inside; when I wander until I’m lost on a hill overlooking the bay; when I eat breakfast on the balcony with a view of the sea and feel so immensely overwhelmed by the beauty of my solitude.
Nice could be the saddest of all cities. It burns. Summer is its greatest tragedy.
I am mourning my departure in advance, as always. It’s my most morbid habit. Where has my time gone all of a sudden? What will I do with my body that stings with salt and sunshine once back in the aching fields of Ohio? My body is forbidden there. They judge me down to my bones.
Sometimes I am convinced that I won’t be buried there. I hope hibiscus will grow near my grave. I want an olive tree planted in my backyard. I want a courtyard with walls where ivy climbs. I want my gardens to be lined with lavender. I hope to hear cicadas outside my windows at night. I hope one day my children will want to see the country I came from. I want them to be bilingual, like me. I want to tell them the stories that my mother and my grandmother told me. I want to hold them and tell them “je t’aime.”
And if I never go home? If I abandon the work that I have started there? If I promise to my friends that I’ll write? If I sell my car and my furniture? If I pack my library of literature into a big box labeled “Anglophone” and store it in my closet until it’s dusty? I’d be no better off than before—adrift, aloof, alone. As for happy I cannot yet say. My greatest fear is that one day I’ll stop loving this country, that I’ll grow old with it no happier than I would have been elsewhere.
We ambiguously aspiring expatriates are a lonely bunch. We just don’t know where we belong. We’ve stretched the cord to the mother country but we haven’t quite severed it. We’re licking at our open wounds. We shop and drive and read and make love in a foreign tongue, but we will always count to ten and cuss in our native language until the day that we die.
* * *
The most beautiful day that I remember in Nice, it rained. It was cloudy in the morning, stifling, the humidity as high as the sky was low and the bus was late as usual. I listened to The National on the bus to school because I was lonely among people. It began drizzling by the time I got to school. Our grammar review of adverbial clauses and gerunds was punctuated by rain but by the time we paused for lunch the city was again whitewashed like an overexposed photograph. Painfully bright, le soleil brûlant, the ochre buildings of la Place Masséna standing like sunburned guards of the blinding sea surging beyond the Promenade des Anglais. But by mid-afternoon the clouds were back to menace the sky and I sat at the back of the bus with my book and my brain all clouded over by the newest novel by Nina Bouraoui.
Chez moi, I sat on the balcony to read. I didn’t notice the rain until I heard what I thought was the beat of soft percussion coming from the garden below, but it was just the rain tap tap tapping on a plastic gutter like a hollow African drum. The rain was sudden and claustrophobic. The mountains veiled themselves in fog and the sea disappeared into the horizon. Claps of thunder came from nowhere and everywhere all at once. A bolt of lightening over the water illuminated a hole in the sea and the thunder ricocheted off of the invisible mountains to the north like a boomerang. The palms drooped like weeping willow trees in the rain.
And then as subtly as it started, the tap tap tapping on the gutter slowed to a steady, lethargic beat. The smells returned all at once, wet, sensual, rich: sweet silver pine, hints of lavender, eucalyptus, hibiscus. The apricot and lemon trees in the garden glimmered with citrus gems. I could see the sea begin to move again, a sleeping giant groaning under a thin sheet, deep and dark and black and blue as a new bruise. The clouds lumbered out to sea like the ferries that depart for Corsica from the port and a rainbow took their place, a great arching gate to the fiery, forbidden continent across the salty belly of mother Mediterranean.
A cool breeze from the sea sighed with the scent of salt and the recent rain. The sky was clear all at once and from the balcony I watched a sailboat skirt the shore. Ever since the summer solstice—when I was still hundreds of kilometers away, isolated in the French Alps—the evening has been creeping up earlier and earlier, a sunlight thief. The shadows slink up the sides of the buildings, one story of balconies and awnings after another. There are more gardens on the balconies in this city than there are on the ground. On their balconies, my thousand anonymous neighbors grow orchids and morning glories. But I didn’t come to Nice to see gardens and parks; I wanted to stand at the edge of a continent and feel the waves around my ankles pulling me out to sea like watery manacles.
There is something about the Mediterranean that makes me fall in love with everything. After the rain that day I was drawn from my balcony and down to the sea. It was the color of slate, or a magnet, the color of the roof of my parents’ house, surging under the low clouds after the storm. As I walked along Rue Robert Latouche and down to the water I was fascinated by the flowers and the trees and all I wanted was to know what they were called. I wanted to name them all, to cultivate my own garden of Eden. I know that Paradise no longer exists because I admit that I am sometimes ashamed of my sex and because now I bleed on the moon’s schedule and not my own. But no angel or god could tell me not to eat from the tree of knowledge and taste its fruits of passion.
As I walked down to the shore I crushed leaves between my fingers as I pashed bushes along the sidewalk just to smell them. I ran my hands through the juniper bushes that spilled over the walls of the villas on the hill and I remember that their odor was sweet like the mountains yet salty like the sea.
I put my earbuds in because suddenly I felt all alone there on the street but I couldn’t stand the thin digital sound and I took them out again just to listen to the people around me speak. The tongues of the Mediterranean are too sweet to taste. The Italians sing when they speak. The French kiss when they meet. The Arabic of the Algerians and the Moroccans is as windswept and sunburned and infinite as the great shifting dunes south of the Atlas mountains.
That evening I was hungry I remember but I preferred the smell of salt after a sudden storm to a thin dinner of rice and zucchini. I am too poor to be living in the French Riviera, really, I know it, but the Mediterranean is gold every evening at sunset. The rocks where I sat that evening down by the shore felt alive. They had kept the heat of the sun long after the sky had lost its brilliant light and they warmed my palm when I touched them. On the rocky beach, people sat in little groups of two, three, four, with their umbrellas, their fishing rods, their picnic baskets, their beer. The children no longer ran the length of the beach, shrieking in the waves. It was the sitting hour. I sat and waited while the sun and the moon exchanged thrones. The round, powdered face of the full moon reigned the sky in royal blue and her King surveyed the western front beyond the horizon. The sun would soon disappear beyond the hills and the sunset would unfurl like a tapestry over the water. Twilight fell softly, almost reluctantly. With a ripple the surface of the water changed from silk to velvet, with the vast silence of the sea reposing in that rocking cradle of civilization.
There was a man sitting alone near the water that evening, I remember, his back was to me, his head was down. I always feel a certain solidarity with other solitary souls. I was tempted to go to him, to say hello, to join our two solitudes and make us one, but I didn’t disturb his silence. Solitude is as precious as a polished stone. And I am so alone here.
I watched the waves and I wanted them to caress me, to roll over me, to envelop me in their watery embrace. I watched the waves and I thought about desire, what it meant. I thought of the people that I had desired, and the few I had actually loved.
That night I dreamt of Romain, my landlord Josy’s son. He is older than me, but not by too much. He has a life in Paris and he says he likes it better there. I can’t understand why. Josy said that once Romain had a serious girlfriend and somehow that makes me jealous because I’ll never know him like she once did.
In my dream he came into my bedroom during the night and he watched me while I slept. Beneath my eyelids, I knew he was there. I kept my eyes closed but I let my lips twitch into the thin smile that good dreams always inspire. I imagined him watching me and wondering what dream had made me smile so. When I did open my eyes he was there in the doorway and he wasn’t embarrassed to have been watching me sleep, like a father who stands at the door of his baby daughter’s bedroom. He was bare-chested in my dream and stronger than I had remembered and his hair was wet and long around his ears. We didn’t speak but we went out together to walk along Avenue de la Lanterne in the dawn. We walked slowly, never talking, never touching, but close enough that we could feel each others’ heat and it was as though he were caressing me from all sides, holding me tightly like the waves embrace the shore.
He wasn’t there in the morning when I truly woke up alone in bed with the dawn. I never really know where he sleeps at night, perhaps at a girl’s place, in her bed, under her sheets, his arm around her waist and her hair on the pillow that they shared.
On that day in July with the rain, I didn’t return to the house until the sun was going down. It felt like a morning with a hangover. My head pounded with the waves. Children cried leaving the beach. Men watched me as I walk, like they always do. A group of students was walking down the street as I climbed the hill. There were seven of them and they made me upset, the way they clung to one another, they way they speak loudly in English, the way their hips swayed with alcohol. They must have been only a few years younger than me, two perhaps, no more than four, but I found their youth suddenly abrasive, ignorant.
No one was home. There are people that come and go here but this is a house that no one truly lives in. It can’t be. There is a vase of decorative umbrellas in the hall. The white leather couches have no dents. There are no towels in the bathroom. There are no streaks on the stove. There is a pile of antique baggage next to the door, like some ancient voyager is perpetually trying to leave but never quite succeeds. The boys come and go but they leave no fingerprints. My sheets are stretched so tightly across the bed that no crease or hollow proves that a body has slept there.
I’m not afraid of the silence. It excites me. It has a certain electric charge. It is filled with secrets. Josy says that her sons miss their father, that ever since the affair their family has been invaded by a void that now shrouds them and silences them. Two years ago, Josy’s husband was in a moto accident that left him paralyzed in a hospital bed for months. Several surgeries later, he ran away with his nurse. A bad soap opera drama. Josy says that Damien, the youngest son, misses his father the most, and he continues on like nothing ever happened. Roman, the eldest son, now hates his father, and refuses to speak to him, to acknowledge him, to respect him. I’m not sure how Audré feels.
I rarely see the boys, but I hear Damien sometimes when he comes home late at night. Josy says he has a wild side, something in his silence that troubles her. I hear him shuffling through the halls and closing the doors softly after him, like Josy always asks him to do. I hear the faucet in the bathroom, the flush of the toilet, the muffled tones of a phone conversation out on the balcony where he smokes a pétard. While his mother was away in Rennes for her July vacation, I would sometimes find Damien sitting alone in the white salon in the evenings, burning down a block of Moroccan kif to roll a joint. He doesn’t know that I know. Josy doesn't know either. He has a timid smile, Damien does, and short curly hair that frames his thin face, making him look younger than he is.
He used to be chubby, Josy told me. We were standing in the living room one night until well after midnight and she was showing me pictures of her beloved family, of her sons, of her daughter Audré and her fiancé. They can’t have children, and Audré sometimes hates her fiancé for it, for the fact that her finite life force that bleeds out with her every month.
Josy calls me ma puce, ma belle, ma chérie, ma coquinette. Out of the wounds of her divorce she shows affection for a stranger. Her adopted, fertile daughter. She is affectionate but her home is sterile. She asks that I wipe out the washing machine with a sponge after I use it so the excess water doesn’t get stagnant and musty. She provides a squeegee in the shower so the walls and doors don’t get streaks She asks that I empty the Nespresso machine after each use so the espresso capsules don’t stick. Her refrigerator is organized but nearly empty. She is never home for dinner. She unplugs all of her appliances after she uses them. She arranges my shoes in the hallway closet. She keeps all of her makeup evenly spaced on the shelf in her bathroom. I wonder what she is afraid of.
I look for evidence of life in this silent house like an archaeologist digs for bones in the dirt. Two toothbrushes in a tin cup on the sink. Two bottles of men’s cologne. Two skateboards lined up by the door. A pair of shoes on the balcony. A pair of pants set out on the back of a chair to dry. Open doors that used to be closed. Closed doors that used to be open. Lingering humidity on the shower door. A new roll of toilet paper. A fresh bar of soap. One less yogurt in the refrigerator. A box of sugar cubes left ajar. An ashtray on the counter. An empty dishwasher. I fabricate a false intimacy with the fleeting traces of their presence. I track their movements like ghosts. The clinking of keys in the hall. The sound of a scooter idling on the street.
It is the silence that drives me down to the shore. The sea belongs to the men at night, and I would not be safe there on the rocks, buffeted by the waves, but sometimes in the afternoons after class I would get off the bus five stops before Arcadia and walk to the Promenade that stretches along the sea. I open my book but the water is too blue to read. Men look at me as they pass behind me, I know they do. They stare at my neck, my shoulders, my thighs, my hair—not because they are particularly lovely, but because I am a woman alone. That’s all that matters. And sometimes, I admit it, I turn and look back at them. It excites me, not because I desire them—no, not their bodies, their thighs thick from soccer, their collarbones under their polos, their big hands that smell like cigarettes, their strong lips that bruise the soft skin on girls’ necks, their coarse hair—but because my gaze excites them in return. And I like to have that sense of control. I look just long enough to feel their eyes between my shoulder blades as they pass.
I look out over the water where low cumulous clouds collect on the horizon in the afternoons like a fleet of flagships lost at sea. On the rocky beach, bodies bronze, burn. I keep myself at a distance, always, but sometimes I want to reach out and touch their skin, let it warm my own. And sometimes I want sex like I want cigarettes, something strong to fill my empty, lonely spaces, to infiltrate my lungs, my deepest caverns. I have never been a smoker but sometimes I crave it, but only in the rain, in the evenings, on my balcony that overlooks the sea. And sometimes I just want to be close enough to smell a cigarette burning. But more than anything the thought of sex makes me feel lonely. Like a child who just wants to be held.
For now, France will be my lover. For now, I have Romain’s cologne on my wrist, stolen from the shelf in the bathroom just to see what it smelled like. He leaves for Paris tomorrow, Romain does. One less toothbrush. One less bottle of cologne. One less load of laundry drying on the line. One less backpack posed on the table. One less skateboard lying on the floor. One less pair of lungs breathing in the bedroom next door. A half-full ashtray, a half-smoked blunt, a bed with only one body, a pillow left unused.
He will take a train from Nice towards Marseille, skirting the Mediterranean, screaming past the graveyard industries of ugly Miramas, winding up through the barren Calanques and past Martigues and its canals and its pastel streets all lined with rowboats instead of cars, then north through dry Avignon and its fields of lavender and sunflowers long past their season, around Carpentras and its view of Mont Ventoux with its windy memories of Petrarch and his beloved Laura, through Lyon and over its bridges, past the stubborn castles that speckle the Loire valley, across the great bread belly of France, and finally to Paris, to the bright lights of the big city, a city that only exists in fashion magazines and romantic dreams, a city where people fuck and drink and smoke and shop and flaunt and maybe even fall in love, but where no one actually seems to live. Five hundred and seventy nine miles away from his first love, from his mother, from his brother, from his sister, from the sea, from me.
A key in the lock, a sudden urgency, a self-conscious fear of indecency. The rhythm of footsteps on the tile floor, not syncopated, he’s alone. He’ a shadow, a pair of pants drying on the laundry line, a door that mysteriously opens and closes, a bookshelf that tells me that sometimes he tries to cook, that he has explored Monaco, that he knows the French penal code upside-down and backwards, that he watches old films by Tarantino, that when he was young he listened to U2 and the Beatles, that he has a fleeting interest in French poetry and theater, that he visits le Louvre from time to time. He rolls his own cigarettes. He drives a scooter. He loves a woman, and he’s leaving her tomorrow.
* * *
This last week has been nothing but departures. It hums with goodbyes. I can see the airport from my balcony where I eat breakfast in the morning. It is situated just next to the sea, the runway built on a peninsula that juts out into the water. When the planes take off towards destinations as anonymous as their passengers, they bank out over the sea, the coastline opening up below like a great oyster with an ochre-red gem tucked inside. Sometimes in the afternoons after class, we would lie on the beach with our bellies to the sun and our toes buried in the rocks, and we would watch the planes come and go and try to guess where they were from, where they were going. I always imagined the row of portholes lining the side of the planes all filled with pale faces still eager for the sun, jealous of the waves, longing for the beat of the baked stones that replace the sand on the niçois shore.
Once Michelle and I swam out into the sea as far as we could, but I wanted to go even further into the waves, out to the yellow buoys that floated off in the distance, an unobtainable finish line to a race from which I knew I would never return. The salt wouldn’t keep me afloat forever. But I floated on my back with my eyes closed for as long as I could, letting myself be carried off by the current’s whims. When I opened my eyes the water was so blue that I wanted to cry. My face was so streaked with salt that no one would have known.
On that afternoon I remember that sitting on the beach behind us was une famille métissée—a white woman and a North African man and their beautiful, brown children. I watched them through my sunglasses. The woman was covered from head to toe, a towel balanced on her head to protect her face from the sunlight, a towel spread out over her legs, a thin white blouse covering her neck and shoulders. Her husband left her alone and sat on the edge of the shore, his feet and chest bare in the sunlight, his hair black, his back brown, his toes touching the water every time a wave rolled in. The children ran and shouted into the waves and out again, past their father and towards their mother. I watched them and wondered if they would have the same complexes as my beloved Nina Bouraoui, the tomboy daughter of an Algerian man and a French woman. Will their hearts and skin ache for the fiery shores of the North African coast? Will they ever learn Arabic? Will they remember the violence of their father’s own childhood? Will they be able to reconcile their métissage? Will they hold a grudge against the soil of their mother’s country? Will they care about neocolonialism? Will they eat couscous or duck? Will they ever hate their parents for their skin? Will they regret their childhood? Will they ache for their innocence? Or will their generation learn to accept them, to tolerate their parents’ love, to reconcile a violent colonial past? Somehow I doubt it. It means so much to know where home is.
Now that all of my classmates are gone—back to Milan, to Chicago, to Vienna, to Slovakia, to London—I walk and I walk and I walk. I wander until my shins hurt and my arches buckle. To Cannes, to Monaco, to Menton, to St. Paul de Vence, to Mont Baron. I roam like Rimbaud, shambling after some bohemia along Petrarch’s path across the south of France; like Rousseau, composing carnets full of confessions in his head as he wandered; like Woolf, haunting the alleys of London, from Westminster, past Buckingham Palace, through St. James Park, up to Regent’s Park and back again. I wander because I’m afraid to stay put, because my shadow gives me company, because I don’t know what else to do.
And what can I say of my wanderings? Only so much as a lonely traveler can say. Monaco is heartbreaking and immaculate, with untouchable lawns but touchable women for a certain price, full of Christian hypocrisy and palm trees and yachts. Cannes has real sand beaches, children with chins sticky with ice cream, a castle on a hill, a park with palms, a port, and a promenade, like all towns on the French Riviera. Menton’s hills are covered with villas and cemeteries, its buildings brilliant in a sun soaked pastel palette, its streets lined with orange trees. Antibes has an aura of Picasso, a harbor filled with foreign yachts, sea banks built up with boulders, a castle with consecutive weddings and a square perpetually covered with rice and rose petals, a market, and a public fountain where children splash and mothers watch. St. Paul de Vence is populated by hunchbacked white heads with eyes too recessed and fragile for the Mediterranean sun, wandering among galleries upon galleries where businessmen and women parade as artists with paintbrushes and unkept hair tucked behind their ears. Cimiez has a park filled with olive trees where monks wander and a hotel where Queen Victoria once stayed. And everywhere I wandered, the salty salty sea kept the whole coastline afloat, the great bulging belly of mother Mediterranean, cradling civilization along her violent and dazzling coast.
And what of Nice? A new postal code to add to my growing list of lovers. I loved the port the most, at night, alone, out along the embankment the whole way to the lighthouse, where the ferries to Corsica docked in the dark. The vast stillness of the water. The waves tugging at the dock like impatient children. The great watery inkwell where, if I jumped and held my breath, I could so quickly disappear, as quietly and beautifully as the Little Prince vanishing from the desert, in search of his sunset.
Je sais la tristesse du regard pour l’horizon, une ligne sans limites. Je sais l’impuissance. Je sais le désir, parfois, d’un autre pays, une illusion. La mer est une promesse.
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