Fly-Fishing the 41st (8 page)

With the rod in the crook of his arm, Philippe inspected his flies in the battered metal boxes he kept in his vest. He picked out a small pheasant-tail nymph with an orange head and tied it onto his line. The wind was up and agitated the river's surface.

Philippe walked to the river and positioned himself behind the fish. He stood there one hour, waiting for the sun to come out of the clouds so that he might be able to see the fish again. I waited on the bridge above him.

He had nothing to aid him in the wait, neither a cigarette to smoke nor a piece of grass to chew on. I wondered what he was thinking about. When the sun did come out, the big fish was no longer there.

By the time we arrived at the next bridge the sky had cleared. Under a tree that overhung the left bank of the river, far below, Philippe spotted an enormous trout, probably six pounds. Its head was facing downstream, into the circling current of a large eddy. “It's the largest trout I've seen this spring,” he whispered, as if the fish could hear us. “If I catch it I'll buy a bottle of champagne and we'll drink it.”

If Philippe could position himself to cast under the overhanging tree without spooking the trout, the rest would be easy; the trout would take the fly and he would tire it and kill it in the deep green water under the bridge. It took him forty minutes to clamber down the hill and approach the fish. When he was close enough to cast, though, he saw that fungus had attacked its head and sides. “
Truite malade,
” he muttered, and walked back to the bridge.

We ate lunch out of the back of the red Citroën. Philippe was impatient to get back to the river. It was well into the afternoon and still he had not caught a fish.

 

When we arrived at the next spot the wind was up and it was difficult to spot fish in the uneven water over the flat yellow gravel. We sat on a rock above some briars overlooking the river. The clouds passed over and Philippe stared into the yellow-green water, looking for any movement or incongruence beneath the current.

Philippe touched his neck, red with sun, and let his rod lay limp in the briars. He shifted, stretched his spine, even picked up a pebble and flicked it in the tall grass along the bank. Cars passed behind him on the road and long shadows crept across the stones where he sat. I was passing into sleep.

Before Philippe had seen the cruising fish he had sensed it coming and was up on his feet. The trout he saw was big, moving
upstream toward him, and he had slid down through the briars to the bank to prepare himself for their meeting. He changed the fly at the end of his leader, and by the time he did so, the fish was within casting range.

The trajectory was perfect, the fish sipped in the fly, and with a swift strike it was hooked.

Philippe ran down the river after the fish, holding his rod high, his arm extended above his head. One hundred yards downstream the gravel flats ended in a deep hole. He had landed the fish in his mind prematurely, though. The line broke and he held his head in his hands pulling air through his clenched teeth. He made one guttural curse at the passing clouds and then climbed through the briars to the car.

C
RAYFISHING IN THE
B
OIS

F
ishing in the Seine was not the only option for one who chose to subsist as a hunter-gatherer in Paris. In his Paris memoir,
A Moveable Feast,
Hemingway wrote of killing pigeons with his trusty slingshot and making meals of them. He would not have bothered, perhaps, had he known of the prolific crayfish population in the ponds of the Bois de Boulogne in western Paris.

On my return to Paris, Pierre invited me to join him and his family on one of their mid-spring rituals, crayfishing in the
bois.

The
bois
was a verdant wood of willow, chestnut, and plane trees. By Pierre's accounts the
écrevisse
were plentiful, large, easy to catch, and delicious in a cream-and-butter sauce.

Inside the old
bordel,
Carole was preparing food in baskets for our outing. The three children, May Fario, Venice, and Marlin, were running up and down the stairs fighting and yelling at one another. Pierre was in his cave, hastily filling a bag with the crayfish nets.

“This is the only way I can survive living in downtown Paris,” he noted, “to get out once in a while.”

After fighting through traffic in Pierre's van, we arrived in the
bois,
where the heat was dampened by the shade trees and the crowds had vaporized. Parisians in swimsuits sunbathed on the grass, and in quiet corners they lay out nude.

The collapsible crayfish traps were made of nylon netting pulled over concentric wire circles. The traps flattened when set on the mud-bottom of the pond, but when you pulled them up they were basin shaped.

May Fario and Venice were in charge of two traps each. They lowered their traps baited with chicken wings to the bottom and tied them by a string to trees on the bank. The best spot to set the traps was by a little bridge at the north end of the pond. They caught many crayfish, olive colored on the backs with orange legs and underclaws, and put them in a creel of woven reeds. Pierre set traps too, but never checked them; he fell asleep on the grass with a straw hat covering his face.

Marlin was too young to set his own traps. Instead, he raced naked up and down the path along the pond with a
casquette
on his head, charging pigeons with a sword of green willow. Meanwhile, Carole lit a cigarette and prepared lunch, unwrapping a checkered cloth on a picnic table.

We ate sugar melon and ham with baguettes and drank ice-cold beer. After lunch, Pierre went back to sleep. I stood with May Fario on the bank. She was an attractive and astute fourteen, with dark brown hair and freckles.

“He always does that,” she complained, looking to her sleeping father. “But he's been better since Marlin was born.” Just then, May
Fario was pulling up one of her traps and I noticed, as it emerged from the dark water, that a condom had settled in the bottom of it. “I'll reset this one,” I said to her.

Carole seemed more comfortable here in the
bois.
As she smoked she shared childhood stories about crayfishing with her father on the shore of Lake Michigan, where she grew up. Marlin whipped his sword at pigeons and then sat with his bare butt on the picnic bench to look at the captured crayfish in the creel.

“Be careful, Marlin,” Carole called.

“
Eclwewisse, eclwewisse,
” he repeated, reaching with his fingers into the basket of olive-and-orange-colored crayfish. They snapped at his fingers. Venice came up to the creel to show Marlin how to hold the crayfish.

When we had caught three dozen large crayfish, enough for dinner, we wound the lines around the traps, gathered the food, and returned through the congested city to rue Mazet to unload the gear.

Carole boiled the crayfish in salted water until they turned a savory red color. Then the crayfish were steeped in a sauce of butter and cream.

“You don't know how to eat them?” Pierre asked me when we sat down to eat and he saw my puzzled look. “Don't you have them in Connecticut? You take them like this with your hand and twist them like this and suck the meat out,” he said, smiling, and looked at Marlin. “You must make as much noise as possible,
slurp, slurp,
but the best is this with the bread.” He soaked up the creamy pink sauce with baguette hunks and poured more wine in my glass. “It's a good chardonnay,” he said.

The children looked at Pierre as if he were crazy and laughed. Pierre and Carole argued over what wine Hemingway drank with
goujon,
a small sweet fish often fried whole, whether Sancerre or Chablis. Pierre corrected himself, “No, I'm sure it was muscadet.”

F
ISHING THE
M
OST
B
EAUTIFUL
P
OOL
IN THE
W
ORLD

T
he home of the artist–tax inspector François Calmejane was 41, rue de Seine, not far from Pierre's office.

“You will love François's apartment,” Pierre told me as we waited outside his door. “We will have dinner there tonight after the fishing.”

The street was silent except for the sound of clinking glasses, clanking silverware, and muffled conversation from La Palette restaurant. It was Saturday evening.

This part of the sixth arrondissement was known for harboring artistic and creative, sometimes eccentric, people. (Picasso painted
Guernica
in his studio here.) Even so, it was not every day that you saw a man step from a door in the stone façade dressed in fishing clothes.

François held his pipe handsomely in his teeth. A knowing smile crept across his face. He knew he looked ridiculous. He was wearing a bowler hat, a flannel shirt and jeans, and his fishing tackle was strapped to his body by old leather belts tied together so comfortably that it seemed he was never without them—a net, a box with bait, a creel, a tackle bag, and rods, each rigged with hooks and heavy lead sinkers.

“'Jour, Pierre,” François said, and they shook hands. I took François's creel and Pierre took his net. In front of La Palette, where people were taking their dinners, François bent down to pick up a copy of the
Financial Times
from the gutter, its pink paper smeared with melted ice cream. He handed it to Pierre and Pierre handed it to me.

“To hold the eels, James,” Pierre explained.

François led us through the people dining at the outdoor tables of La Palette. “
Bonjour, pêcheur,
” called the waiter, as if he'd seen him pass many times. The people dining laughed at him. Smoke curled from under the fisherman's hat, mingling with theirs.

The fisherman headed for Pont Neuf and the park at the tip of the island. He walked by the gilt statue of Henri IV and down the dark stairs under Pont Neuf. An Englishman brushed the
pêcheur
in the narrow passage and laughed to his companion. “You'd think the bloke was fishing for a year with all that gear.”

When we reached the Seine, we saw our fishing spot at the tip of the island covered with people. They had come to enjoy the twilight by the water, gathered in groups all over the island, picnicking with dinner and wine under the thick, arching willow tree, laughing, playing drums and guitars among the roses. It was a loud, happy circus, in the midst of which the
pêcheur
assembled his fishing rods.

He laid out his tackle indelicately, dropping his bait box on a German man's leg, nearly spilling all the worms on the German lady beside him. The couple took their wine and moved farther from the fisherman. François stuffed his pipe and acknowledged his territorial gain with a shrug. Real estate was dear on the island on a Saturday evening in late May, and there is little wonder—it is one of the lovelier places in Paris to watch the sunset. Pierre put the sentiment in fisherman's terms.

“It's the most beautiful pool in the world,” he said.

François baited one of his lines with a big nightcrawler. Swinging the long fiberglass rod, five-ounce sinker, and worm neatly between the heads of couples engaged at the mouth, he flung his bait into the middle of the river. It landed with a solid sound,
ploof.
He handed me the rod.

I put the rod down on the cobbles and the current drew the line taut. François looked up at me under his hat and took his pipe in hand.

“We lost a rod last year that way,” Pierre remembered. “A big bream pulled it into the water but we were able to recover the line by casting a lure over it and retrieving it by hand. We got the rod back and the fish.”

Along the Left Bank were moored fishing boats in motley colors and some clunky sailboats with wooden masts. Passing by at intervals were the tourist boats, the
bâteaux mouches,
some open to the air and some enclosed. Some carried couples dining over tablecloths. Their wakes pulled at our lines and bent our rods. The history of the river and the architecture of Paris were announced by intercom in four languages. The people on the boats waved to the people on the island.

“
Bonne pêche!
” one man yelled. François scowled.

“In France,
bonne pêche
or
bonne chasse
is considered a curse,” Pierre explained, taking a chunk of cheese from François's bag and procuring a knife to cut it. “I've seen it happen dozens of times; you wish someone good fishing and they catch nothing—nothing! If you're going to say anything, it is better to say
bonne chance
or
bon voyage.
”

That was not the case this evening, though, because shortly thereafter one of the rods bent with a fish. The people sitting on their blankets couldn't believe the crazy
pêcheur
had actually hooked one.

“He's hooked the bottom,” said the German to his lady. Moments later, François hauled a two-foot eel flipping up the inclined wall and onto the lap of another young lady, who was also German, a beautiful blond wearing a white dress. She spilled her glass of white wine and gave the
pêcheur
a nasty look with icy blue eyes. But François passed the cries of
Scheisse
to the big overhanging willow, which passed them to the breeze that blew from the sea at Le Havre.

A sedentary poet with an open book of Baudelaire, stationary as a bow ornament on a ship at the very tip of the island, uncrossed his legs and stood up wide-eyed as if he'd never seen a living creature pulled from the water.

“
Incroyable,
” the poet cried out, “
incroyable!
”

I had been flipping through the sticky
Financial Times
and admiring the way the descending sun played rose on the pink paper, but had to give up the “companies and markets” because the
pêcheur
demanded it. He took it with his big hands and laid it on the eel, and as the eel slipped through, it covered the stock-market tables in a thick white slime. He grabbed the eel's head and it wound its tail around the sleeve of his flannel coat—already encrusted with the dry crystallized mucus of a thousand eels.