Traveler’s Journal (December 2007)

The ancient Greeks believed that the spirits of the newly dead, arriving in the underworld, had to drink from the River Lethe whose magical waters erased their memories and prepped them for oblivion.  Something similar must happen to me after every long journey.  Maybe it’s the relief of homecoming or the serotonin released by seeing friends, lovers, or familiar places again, but a mysterious power wipes my brain clean each time.

I know this must be true because I hate travel, or at least the logistics of it.  Destinations I love; it’s getting there I can’t stand.  Indeed, I grow cranky after more than an hour in a car, plane, or bus.  Trains are the only mode of transport that don’t make me claustrophobic.  On a train, at least, I can pace up and down the aisles or even move from one carriage to the next when my legs grow seriously restless.  I can read on a train, too, whereas a bus’s or car’s constant jiggling often makes books or magazines a vertigo- and nausea-inducing risk.  But even a train ride of more than four hours (the time it takes to go from New York to D.C., say) quickly stales.  So, something or someone must squeeze “wolf’s bane, tight-rooted” for its “poisonous wine” in my head after every trip and make me forget the dreaded ordeal of travelling, leaving only the joy of arrival as an enigmatic residue in my amygdala and associated neural networks.

When I was in graduate school in Boston and traveled frequently to New York to visit friends, the five and a half hours it took by train each way drove me nuts after a while.  Only the enormous amounts of reading and writing required of a first- and second-year doctoral student in literature (a sort of hazing ritual) made the repeated trips bearable—a hive-inducing panic trumping my traveler’s irritation.

I’ve never been a patient traveler, either.  Delays, bad signage, confusing maps, wrong turns, breakdowns, flight changes, detours, cancellations, missed connections, and inaccurate schedules tend to overwhelm my spontaneous Irish half and summon the demons of my Germanic heritage—a frightening Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde transformation.  Of course, the miniscule, rational portion of my head knows the unexpected and the unscheduled are, for the traveler, a cardinal rule of thumb.  It makes no difference.  I can’t help myself.  When I travel with companions, I do my best to keep the monster in a cage, but it’s a struggle.

Before the electrification of the tracks between New Haven and Boston, for instance, the Amtrak train would have to stop for a layover in the New Haven station.  If you were on a northbound train, the crew had to unhitch the electric engine and attach a diesel one from another track.  Southbound trains underwent a reverse operation.  Not infrequently, there were problems.  The right engine was nowhere to be found, apparently.  Or it was late.  Or it was broken.  Or the engineer needed to make a prolonged argumentative call on a platform pay phone.  I saw this once, in the pre-cellphone era.

Announcements or explanations for these delays were rare or, following a hallowed tradition of American public transportation, garbled or unintelligible.  Some poor soul with a life-threatening speech impediment is always mumbling into a PA system, purchased at a Wal Mart fire sale, and delivering urgent warnings you can’t decipher.  I remember learning that this sorry state of affairs wasn’t inevitable the first time I traveled through Germany, in fact, on a night train from Paris to Copenhagen.  I awoke in astonishment in the Hamburg station as a crystal clear, flawlessly enunciated, “Achtung! Achtung! Passagiere!…” rang out in the station like a muezzin calling a congregation to prayer.   It gave me that peculiar, self-abasing thrill you experience when you realize another country’s social arrangements, architecture, or technology are superior to your own.

At any rate, the effects of Lethe river water always start to wear off midway through any airplane flight.  While we zoom across the time-zone limbo between North America and Northern Europe, for example, and I squirm and toss in my cramped economy class airplane seat, I silently begin to curse myself, still awake despite a dose of Ambien, my “theater-goer’s knee” aching after hours of sitting, my feet swollen, my neck permanently kinked, and my mild airplane phobia already conjuring a possible crash-landing in Ireland or Brittany.  My self-recrimination builds to a point where I sternly rebuke my own indomitable masochism, which has once again driven me to take to the air as if I’d never traveled abroad before.

[…]

This past December, in mid-flight to Paris, I cursed myself again when our slightly imperious Air India hostess, draped in a beautiful orange and yellow sari, served up a dinner of appallingly inedible Indian food.  Needless to say, I was both surprised and vindicated.  Again, this was why I hated going anywhere.  The perverse logic of travel dictated that Air India must provide bad Indian food, just as Air France offers its customers taste-free, ice-cold, crescent-shaped bread rolls masquerading as croissants.  On this flight, what our hostess had claimed was lamb vindaloo actually appeared to be the leavings of a botched laboratory dissection swimming in a viscous, fat-drenched fluid that had been tinted orange… perhaps to match the airplane’s décor.  The curried lentils and basmati rice, a simple traditional dish which truly requires talent to ruin, tasted abominable… acrid and metallic.  After two mouthfuls, I put down my weirdly clumsy fork and started to munch handfuls of nuts and raisins from a bag I’d smuggled on board.  My seatmate shot surreptitious, envious glances my way.  I pretended not to notice, but clutched my trail mix to my chest.

The neurotic anxiety which follows me everywhere, like a swarm of mosquitoes on a summer evening, only grew denser and more blood-thirsty when I queried another stewardess about the complete breakdown of my “individual passenger entertainment system.”   In theory, I should have been able to access a virtual library crammed with mediocre Hollywood movies, American sit-coms, and a host of Bollywood films in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and other languages from the Indian subcontinent.

“Oh, sir, we have no notions yet how to be repairing the IPES, no, none at all,” the stewardess replied, shaking her head and arching her perfectly plucked eyebrows in subtle irritation.

“So there’s nothing you can do?  Like re-booting it?” I asked, desperate for something to relieve the excruciating boredom of the flight’s remaining three or four hours, now that it was clear I wouldn’t sleep.  In my peculiar, half-medicated state reading felt out of the question.

“Sir, this 747 has just been being delivered by your country’s Boeing Airplane Company to Air India a month ago.  Do you see?  You cannot really be expecting us to be understanding how to operate the thing in such a short time, could you?  Would that be a sensible way to be thinking?  Would that be a possible thing to be thinking?”

Turning slightly green, I nodded as if to agree with her assessment of the technical expertise you might reasonably expect from an airplane crew who held their own lives and the lives of over four hundred passengers in their hands.  I staggered back to my seat, convinced the pilot was about to push a red button in the cockpit whose function he hadn’t yet discovered and accidentally send us all plummeting to our deaths.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we did land safely (if still ravenous) at Charles de Gaulle.  No sooner had I disembarked, stumbled through passport control, and retrieved my ludicrously overpacked suitcases from the luggage carrousel, then a wave of excitement crashed over me.  I was back in Paris!  At last!  The excruciating discomfort of the plane ride, the dreary crawl on New Jersey Transit from Penn Station to Newark airport, and the sardine-can subway ride preceding it, were all instantly forgotten.

I didn’t even get testy when the sweet, chatty cab driver whom I’d hailed outside the Gare du Nord managed to make a wrong turn, despite having a GPS unit in his cab, and took another ten expensive minutes to drop me off as close as possible to my destination in the Quartier Beaubourg, near the Centre Pompidou.  In fact, I gave the cab driver a huge tip of seven or eight euros, partly due to my continuing stupor, but also because I was ecstatic at having finally arrived.

The apartment I’d rented on the rue Pierre Lescot exceeded my expectations.  It looked even better in person than it had on the web.  Although the studio was located on the mansard level of an early 18^th century seventh-floor walk-up, I decided that climbing the stairs each day would keep me in good shape.  The apartment, painted white, was outfitted in a style I’d call virginal Zen minimalism, snuggly furnished with a Murphy bed, and ingeniously designed with built-in cupboards and various nooks (one for a desk and others for books).  I felt like I was to be quartered in the captain’s cabin of an old-fashioned sailing ship.  Sunlight streamed through the large dormers on either side.

Eric B., my temporary landlord, had generously hauled my heaviest bag all the way up the seven flights of stairs.  As we stood huffing and puffing in the hallway, I noticed he was pleasantly elegant in that slightly scruffy way Parisian men have perfected.   His five o’clock shadow and dark black eyes were rather arresting, I decided.  He smiled as he answered my polite queries about his holiday plans.  He was heading back to his own family, in Normandy, for Christmas.  His Corsican boyfriend hadn’t yet come out to his own conservative Catholic family, so it was unfortunately not practical for the two of them to escape the Parisian winter chill in Ajacio.

He demonstrated how to add little decalcifying chemical packets to the dishwasher and washing machine each time you used them, asked me to be careful with some of the apartment’s designer lamps, showed me where the extra towels were stowed, then hovered about slightly longer than was strictly necessary, enhancing my good mood.  There’s nothing like a little interest from a handsome man to soothe even the grumpiest temper.

After Eric left, I decided to take advantage of the unusually warm and sunny December Saturday.  I’ve always found it a better strategy to fight off sleep until night.  Synchronize, as soon as you can, your new bedtime to the clock where you’ve arrived, not the clock you’ve left behind.  It seems to reduce jet lag, at least for me.   (My mother doesn’t believe in jet lag, however, and scoffs at those who claim to suffer from it.  “They’re just tuckered out from traveling,” she asserts.  “Get to bed, wake up early, and tough it out!”  It seems to me there’s a whole book waiting to be written on female machismo.)

I keep a little personal tradition whenever I arrive in Paris.  My first destination is always the garden in the Tuileries.  It’s not a very original or unexpected choice, but I don’t care.  It’s where I walked when I made my very first visit to Paris twenty-seven years ago, in the summer of 1980, just before college and the election of Ronald Reagan the following November.

Reassuringly, the Tuileries looked the same as they did in 1980.  In fact, they were in better shape than the last time I saw them, seven years ago.  Then, the gardens were still in the throes of the massive “Projet Mitterand,” involving the construction of an enormous underground parking garage for the Louvre, among other improvements.  They’d dug a giant hole around the pink, gold, and marble Arc du Carrousel.  Dirt, corrugated fencing, and piles of stones were strewn everywhere.

Now, however, the traditional crushed chalk gravel once again lined the formal allées and coated your shoes with a yellowish-beige dust.  The same heavily pruned topiary—what my father liked to call “tortured plant material”—still bordered the side paths.  You can still buy a croque monsieur or a croque madame (delicious variations on the basic toasted cheese sandwich) at ridiculously high prices from vendors in dark green wooden pavilions scattered here and there underneath the savagely pruned lindens and sycamores.  The French treat their plants like stone or clay or marble, sculpting them with an aggression that can disturb someone who grew up in the much more naturalistic Anglo-American gardening tradition, where pruning is supposed to make a bush look more natural than Nature herself could make it, rather than advertising the domineering hand of the gardener.

But I wouldn’t trade the French gardening style in the Tuileries for any number of naturalized English gardens.  The long straight central allée led the eye directly down to the garden’s far end, where it abutted the Place de la Concorde, and the garden gates at that end framed the obelisk from the Temple of Luxor, which Mehemet Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, gave to Charles X in 1829 to curry favor with the soon-to-be deposed French monarch.  The garden’s giant Ferris wheel now sat outside that entrance, too, although I swore it used to be inside the garden itself.  Idly, I wonder why they would have moved it or whether I’d simply mistaken its old position.

Although we’d landed at dawn, it was now three o’clock in the afternoon.  The pale sun was already quite low in the sky.  Paris is much further north than New York City, and the days are much shorter here.  Still, the light was extraordinary, despite its pallor.  There was a lemony warmth to it, which surprised me, given the season.  The sky was cloudless and full of the purest, brightest blue.  People were strolling slowly through the gardens, basking in the unexpected sunshine, but the crowds were nothing like those you see in summer, which can become so dense you can’t enjoy the scenery much.  Perhaps winter has become the discerning tourist’s friend.

Around me in the parterres, for the first time, I noticed—I mean I truly examined—the statuary closely and in detail.  Not that I hadn’t seen it on countless prior visits, but I’d never really observed them closely before.  Somehow, in this barest, leafless time of the year, they were more obtrusive and prominent than they were when the gardens were in bloom.  Perhaps, too, the sunbeams, coming in at a low angle, bathed the marble urns and human figures in a particularly seductive light.  Certainly, I’d never noticed how erotic the statuary seemed.  To my right, a tall, slim, naked marble Diana stood, serene and beautiful despite her missing hands, as if she’d been the victim of a gruesome attack but could not, in her Olympian condition, feel pain.  Only her dog registered the outrage, twisting around her ankles and glowering menacingly at passersby.

Next, I spotted a more voluptuous female nude standing on a pedestal, rubbing up against a pillar and reaching for or caressing a small cult statuette on top of the pillar.  She sported lusciously carved, pear-shaped buttocks, and the sunlight seemed to play wantonly over the sensuous curvature of her spine, thighs, and painfully tender bare feet.  The suppleness of her marble skin was extraordinary.  I could barely repress an impulse to touch her.  A few steps further on and I came across a brawny male nude standing on another pedestal; he seemed the personification of grief.  His head was bowed and shadowed.  He covered his face with his right hand, and his whole slightly stooped posture indicated suffering and defeat.

As I moved along the curving, semi-circular path, the next statue I saw Theseus, clubbing the Minotaur to death.  But the homoerotic charge of this sculpture almost shocked me.  Both the Minotaur (with the head of a bull and the body of a man) and his assailant were also nude—reminding me that the French have much less inhibition about naked men than Americans do.  Even French television ads will show them— from behind, at least.  The hero and the Minotaur were locked in a violent struggle, with the hero having forced the much larger and more muscular Minotaur to the ground.  The hero has thrust his knee into the side of the Minotaur’s chest, and has clearly already clubbed him once, because the Minotaur’s head has lolled to one side and his extraordinarily long and lovingly carved tongue has lolled out of his gaping mouth.  The tip has fallen onto his large right pectoral muscle.

Further on, a naked centaur (half man, half horse) has flung a beautiful struggling naked woman across his back and flank.  The sculptor has taken great pains to carve large arteries or veins along the stomach of the rearing centaur, which made his marble flesh seem almost real in the warm light of the rapidly dying afternoon.

As the sun fell further, the chiaroscuro on the statuary grew more pronounced.  I pulled out my iPhone camera and began to shoot picture after picture.  To my surprise, the pictures seemed to come out quite well.   Perhaps I was just inspired.  Certainly, I felt light-headed.  As I reached the large central fountain, I saw a marble Roman general in the distance, gorgeously backgrounded by the bare branches of some pollarded trees.  I took a picture of him, too.

Suddenly, the earthy smell of roasting chestnuts reached my nose.  I turned away from stern patriarchal glory and saw, further on, underneath a row of trees pruned into box-like shapes, that a vendor was roasting chestnuts over hot charcoal in a tripod brazier. Whenever a  customer would hand him change, he’d scoop up the piping hot chestnuts with a curved metal paddle and pour them into a paper funnel, a handy carrying case.

Unable to resist the bewitching perfume of the roasted nuts, I bought a funnel, myself, and munched them greedily—burning my fingers a little—as I wandered back to my apartment in a sensual, jet-lagged haze.

Click here for a photo gallery of Tuilieries statuary taken on this trip.