Lonesome Traveler (18 page)

When I went down back to the beach in front of Tangier White City it was night and I looked at the hill where I lived all be-sparkled, and thought, “And I live up there full of imaginary conceptions?”

The Arabs were having their Saturday night parade with bagpipes, drums and trumpets: it put me in the mind of a Haiku: —

Walking along the night beach
— Military music
On the boulevard.

SUDDENLY ONE NIGHT IN TANGIER where as I say I'd been somewhat bored, a lovely flute began to blow around three o'clock in the morning, and muffled
drums beat somewhere in the depths of the Medina.— I could hear the sounds from my sea-facing room in the Spanish quarter, but when I went out on my tiled terrace there was nothing there but a sleeping Spanish dog.— The sounds came from blocks away, toward the markets, under the Mohammedan stars.— It was the beginning of Ramadan, the month-long fast. How sad: because Mohammed had fasted from sunrise to sundown, a whole world would too because of belief under these stars.— Out on the other crook of the bay the beacon turned and sent its shaft into my terrace (twenty dollars a month), swung around and swept the Berber hills where weirder flutes and stranger deeper drums were blowing, and out into the mouth of the Hesperides in the softing dark that leads to the dawn off the coast of Africa.— I suddenly felt sorry that I had already bought my boat ticket to Marseille and was leaving Tangier.

If you ever take the packet from Tangier to Marseille never go fourth-class.— I thought I was such a clever world-weary traveler and saving five dollars, but when I got on the packet the following morning at 7 A.M (a great blue shapeless hulk that had looked so romantic to me steaming around the little Tangier jetty from down-the-coast Casablanca) I was instantly told to wait with a gang of Arabs and then after a half hourherded down into the fo'c'sle—a French Army barracks. All the bunks were occupied so I had to sit on the deck and wait another hour. After a few desultory explorations among the stewards I was told that I had not been assigned a bunk and that no arrangements had been made to feed me or anything. I was practically a stowaway. Finally I saw a bunk no one seemed to be using and appropriated it, angrily asking the soldier nearby,
“Ill y a quelqu'un ici?”
He didnt even bother to answer, just gave me a shrug, not necessarily a Gallic
shrug but a great world-weary life-weary shrug of Europe in general. I was suddenly sorry I was leaving the rather listless but earnest sincerity of the Arab world.

The silly tub took off across the Strait of Gibraltar and immediately began to pitch furiously in the long ground swells, probably the worst in the world, that take place off the rock bottom of Spain.— It was almost noon by now.— After a short meditation on the burlap-covered bunk I went out to the deck where the soldiers were scheduled to line up with their ration plates, and already half the French Army had regurgitated on the deck and it was impossible to walk across it without slipping.— Meanwhile I noticed that even the third-class passengers had dinner set out for them in their dining room and that they had rooms and service.— I went back to my bunk and pulled out my old camp pack equipment, an aluminum pot and cup and spoon from my rucksack, and waited.— The Arabs were still sitting on the floor.— The big fat German chief steward, looking like a Prussian bodyguard, came in and announced to the French troops fresh from duty on the hot borders of Algeria to snap to it and do a cleaning job.— They stared at him silently and he went away with his retinue of ratty stewards.

At noon everybody began to stir about and even sing.— I saw the soldiers straggling forward with their pans and spoons and followed them, then advanced with the line to a dirty kitchen pot full of plain boiled beans which were slopped into my pot after a desultory glance from the scullion who wondered why my pot looked a little different.— But to make the meal a success I went to the bakery in the bow and gave the fat baker, a Frenchman with a mustache, a tip, and he gave me a beautiful oven-fresh little loaf of bread and with this I sat on a coil of rope on the bow hatch and ate in the clean winds and actually enjoyed the meal.— Off to
the portside Gibraltar rock was already receding, the waters were getting calmer, and soon it would be lazy afternoon with the ship well into the route toward Sardinia and southern France.— And suddenly (as I had had such long daydreams about this trip, all ruined now, of a beautiful glittering voyage on a magnificent “packet” with red wine in thin-stemmed glasses and jolly Frenchmen and blondes) a little hint of what I was looking for in France (to which I'd never been) came over the public-address system: a song called
Mademoiselle de Paris
and all the French soldiers on the bow with me sitting protected against the wind behind bulkheads and housings suddenly got romantic-looking and began to talk heatedly about their girls at home and everything suddenly seemed to point to Paris at last.

I RESOLVED TO WALK FROM MARSEILLE up on Route N8 toward Aix-en-Provence and then start hitchhiking. I never dreamed that Marseille was such a big town. After getting my passport stamped I strode across the rail yards, pack on back. The first European I greeted on his home soil was an old handlebar-mustached Frenchman who crossed the tracks with me, but he did not return my happy greeting,
“Allo l'Père!”
—But that was all right, the very cobbles and trolley tracks were paradise for me, the ungraspable springtime France at last. I walked along, among those 18th Century smokepot tenements spouting coal smoke, passing a huge garbage wagon with a great work horse and the driver in a beret and striped polo shirt.— An old 1929 Ford suddenly rattled by toward the water front containing four bereted toughs with butts in mouth like characters in some forgotten French movie of my mind.— I went to a kind of bar that was open early Sunday morning where I sat at a table and drank hot coffee
served by a dame in her bathrobe, though no pastries—but I got them across the street in the
boulangerie
smelling of crisp fresh Napoleons and
croissants
, and ate heartily while reading
Paris Soir
and with the music on the radio already announcing news of my eagered for Paris—sitting there with inexplicable tugging memories as though I'd been born before and lived before in this town, been brothers with someone, and bare trees fuzzing green for spring as I looked out of the window.— How old my old life in France, my long old Frenchness, seemed—all those names of the shops,
epicerie, boucherie
, the early-morning little stores like those of my French-Canadian home, like Lowell Massachusetts on a Sunday.—
Quel difference?
I was very happy suddenly.

MY PLAN, SEEING THE LARGENESS of the city, was to take a bus to Aix and the road north to Avignon and Lyon and Dijon and Sens and Paris, and I figured that tonight I would sleep in the grass of Provence in my sleeping bag, but it turned out different.— The bus was marvelous, it was just a local bus and went climbing out of Marseille through tiny communities where you'd see little French fathers puttering in neat gardens as their children came in the front door with long loaves of bread for breakfast, and the characters that got on and off the bus were so familiar I wished my folks had been there to see them, hear them say,
“Bonjour, Madame Dubois. Vous avez ete a la Messe?”
It didnt take long to get to Aix-en-Provence where I sat at a sidewalk cafe over a couple of vermouths and watched Cezanne's trees and the gay French Sunday: a man going by with pastries and two-yard-long breads and sprinkled around the horizon the dull-red rooftops and distant blue-haze hills attesting
to Cèzanne's perfect reproduction of the Provengal color, a red he used even in still-life apples, a brown red, and backgrounds of dark smokeblue.— I thought “The gaiety, the sensibleness of France is so good after the moroseness of the Arabs.”

After the vermouths I went to the Cathedral of St. Sauveur, which was just a shortcut to the highway, and there passing an old man with white hair and beret (and all around on the horizon Cezanne's springtime “green” which I had forgotten went with his smoky-blue hills and rust-red roof) I cried.— I cried in the Cathedral of the Savior to hear the choir boys sing a gorgeous old thing, while angels seemed to be hovering around—I couldn't help myself—I hid behind a pillar from the occasional inquiring eyes of French families on my huge rucksack (eighty pounds) and wiped my eyes, crying even at the sight of the 6th Century Baptistery—all old Romanesque stones with the hole in the ground still, where so many other infants had been baptized all with eyes of lucid liquid diamond understanding.

I LEFT THE CHURCH and headed for the road, walked about a mile, disdaining to hitchhike at first, and finally sat by the side of the road on a grassy hill overlooking a pure Cezanne landscape—little farm roofs and trees and distant blue hills with the suggestions of the type of cliff that is more predominant northward toward Van Gogh's country at Aries.— The highway was full of small cars with no room or cyclists with their hair blowing.— I trudged and thumbed hopelessly for five miles, then gave it up at Eguilles, the first bus stop on the highway, there was no hitchhiking in France I could see.— At a rather expensive cafe in Eguilles, with French families dining in the open patio, I had
coffee and then knowing the bus would come in about an hour, went strolling down a country dirt road to examine the inner view of Cezanne's country and found a mauve-tan farmhouse in a quiet fertile rich valley—rustic, with weathered pink-powder roof tiles, a gray-green mild warmness, voices of girls, gray stacks of baled hay, a fertilized chalky garden, a cherry tree in white bloom, a rooster crowing at midday mildly, tall “Cezanne” trees in back, apple trees, pussywillows in the meadow in the clover, an orchard, an old blue wagon under the barn port, a pile of wood, a dry white-twig fence near the kitchen.

Then the bus came and we went through the Aries country and now I saw the restless afternoon trees of Van Gogh in the high mistral wind, the cypress rows tossing, yellow tulips in window boxes, a vast outdoor cafe with huge awning, and the gold sunlight.—
1
saw, understood, Van Gogh, the bleak cliffs beyond…. At Avignon I got off to transfer to the Paris Express. I bought my ticket to Paris but had hours to wait and wandered down in late afternoon along the main drag—thousands of people in Sunday best on their dreary interminable provincial stroll.

I strolled into a museum full of stone carvings from the days of Pope Benedict XIII, including one splendid woodcarving showing the Last Supper with bunched Apostles grieving head-to-head, Christ in the middle, hand up, and suddenly one of the bunched heads in deeper-in relief is staring right at you and it is Judas!—Farther down the aisle one pre-Roman, apparently Celtic monster, all old carved stone.— And then out in the cobblestoned back-alley of Avignon (city of dust), alleys dirtier than Mexico slums (like New England streets near the dump in the Thirties), with women's shoes in gutters running with medieval slop water, and all along the stone wall raggedy children
playing in forlorn swirls of mistral dust, enough to make Van Gogh weep.—

And the famous much-sung bridge of Avignon, stone, half-gone now in the spring-rushing Rhône, with medieval-walled castles on the horizon hills (for tourists now, once the baronial castle-supporter of the town).—Sort of juvenile delinquents lurking in the Sunday afternoon dust by the Avignon wall smoking forbidden butts, girls of thirteen smirking in high heels, and down the street a little child playing in the watery gutter with the skeleton of a doll, bonging on his upturned tub for a beat.— And old cathedrals in the alleys of town, old churches now just crumbling relics.

Nowhere in the world is as dismal as Sunday afternoon with the mistral wind blowing in the cobbled back streets of poor old Avignon. When I sat in a cafe in the main street reading the papers, I understood the complaint of French poets about provincialism, the dreary provincialism that drove Flaubert and Rimbaud mad and made Balzac muse.

Not one beautiful girl to be seen in Avignon except in that café, and she a sensational slender rose in dark glasses confiding love affairs to her girl friend at the table next to mine, and outside the multitudes roamed up and down, up and down, back and forth, nowhere to go, nothing to do—Madame Bovary is wringing her hands in despair behind lace curtains, Genet's heroes are waiting for the night, the De Musset youth is buying a ticket for the train to Paris.— What can you do in Avignon on a Sunday afternoon? Sit in a cafe and read about the comeback of a local clown, sip your vermouth, and meditate the carved stone in the museum.

But I did have one of the best five-course meals in all Europe in what appeared to be a “cheap” side-street restaurant: good vegetable soup, an exquisite omelet,
broiled hare, wonderful mashed potatoes (mashed through a strainer with lots of butter), a half bottle of red wine and bread and then a delicious flan with syrup, all for supposedly ninety-five cents, but the waitress raised the price from 380 francs to 575 as I ate and I didn't bother to contest the bill.

In the railroad station I stuck fifty francs into the gum machine, which didnt give, and all the officials most flagrantly passed the buck (
“Demandez au contrôleur!”
) and (
“Le contrôleur ne s'occupe pas de çà!”
) and I became somewhat discouraged by the dishonesty of France, which I'd noticed at once on that hellship packet especially after the honest religiousness of the Moslems.— Now a train stopped, southbound to Marseille, and an old woman in black lace stepped out and walked along and soon dropped one of her black leather gloves and a well-dressed Frenchman rushed up and picked up the glove and dutifully laid it on a post so that I had to grab the glove and run after her and give it to her.— I knew then why it is the French who perfected the guillotine—not the English, not the Germans, not the Danes, not the Italians and not the Indians, but the French my own people.