Maiden Voyages (47 page)

Mulot et Petit Jean was the biggest and oldest supplier of gingerbread, and its main store always looked something like a pharmacy. The women who worked there all looked the same, with tight high-breasted bodies and handsome hands and feet, and they went lightly over the tiled floors, behind the high polished counters piled with pretty boxes and the towering cash desk with a little carved fence around its top. They were deft and remote, and yet protective. Now and then for Christmas or birthdays, I sent loaves of the plain kind of gingerbread and boxes of the sticky kind to America, and they advised against shipping a round cake covered with candied cherries, and advised for a smaller square one stuffed with apricot jam, and I smiled at them without their knowing why, nor caring.

The Grey-Poupon shop was on the corner of one of the streets that led off the rue de la Liberté down to the place Bossuet, where Mulot et Petit Jean was, and across from it was a wonderful store where
workmen got their clothes. Al bought a suit there, I remember. It was a navy blue corduroy, a thick-waled corduroy. One time there was a masked students’ ball given by the Mayor in the Ducal Palace, and we both bought harlequin costumes alike there. I skinned my hair back, and was perhaps a little masculine. Al was rather effeminate, I think. Anyway, we both wore makeup, and he, to me, was obviously a man and I was obviously a girl, and it was fun.

The shop also had smocks for various kinds of working people (they all had their own smocks, navy blue, or dark gray), and there were lots of butchers’ aprons. Every kind of workman had his own quality and cut and color of suit. I still have a smock that I bought there. It is gray and ugly, but I still have it hanging in my closet. I haven’t worn it for years, but I keep it, for some reason. It would be a nice thing for a sculptor or cabinet worker … something to wipe gluey old hands on.…

There were people who belted out street songs in 1929–1930. There were usually two people: One would be a wounded veteran from the war—World War I, which was still very keen in their minds, of course—and then there would be a woman. The man would sit on a little stool usually, and the woman would go around and collect pennies and sell sheet music now and then. They would sing a song, and sometimes they’d sing two or three, but they would sell the sheet music to people for a penny. I always stopped and listened, but it seems odd that I don’t remember ever paying for and getting a piece of sheet music.

The Ducal Palace was at the far end of the rue de la Liberté facing the place d’Armes, and it was a series of majestic buildings, which housed the mayor’s offices as well as the museums. In its courtyard was the Ducal Kitchen, which was nothing but a great chimney rising from a space which formed the oven itself.

There were several other things in the courtyard, including the brooding statue of Claus Sluter, the first great sculptor of Burgundy, who did the Puits de Moïse, which is outside the town. The great tower of Phillipe Le Bon was toward the back of the high buildings and rose high above even the churches. The rue de la Liberté separated the Ducal Palace from the place d’Armes, which was its natural parade ground and always seemed the center of town.

Down the rue de la Liberté from the ducal Palace, there was the Opera House, the place de l’Opéra, and the small Café de l’Opéra. There was also a famous printshop, where they printed James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and other writers forbidden in America and England. There were strange typos in them, because all the proofreaders were, of course, Frenchmen speaking English. They finally did print Al’s thesis and later Larry Powell’s, because printing theses was their livelihood. Then there was the grain market, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays there would be lots of pigeons walking around, picking up seeds that the merchants had dropped from their pockets.

Behind the Ducal Palace ran the oldest marketing street in town. It was very narrow and crowded and dirty, and it was the most picturesque part of town, with gabled buildings showing the famous tiled roofs of Burgundy … green and yellow and black and red. And there was the beautiful small place François Rude and finally the
place
where people gathered to see the famous gargoyles and the great clock Jacquemart with its mechanized figures on the façade of the église Notre-Dame.

The other half of the ancient city was where the place d’Armes spread out in front of the Ducal Palace. Out from the half-circle of the
place
ran a dozen small streets which led into the older quarter of the city, part commercial and part beautiful town houses, which seemed to end for us anyway on the corner of the Chabot-Charny and the rue du Petit-Potet.

The buildings on the place d’Armes were all two stories tall and fairly uniform, and they included several small cafés and tea shops and two restaurants, the Prés aux Clercs and Racouchot’s Three Pheasants. On the corner of one of the streets that went down from the
place
was Venot’s, the main bookstore of the town. It was the only one known to me then, and it supplied all the university books.

Monsieur Venot was a town character and was supposed to be the stingiest and most disagreeable man in Dijon, if not in the whole of France. But I did not know this, and I assumed that it was all right to treat him as if he were a polite and even generous person. I never bought much from him but textbooks, because I had no extra money, but I often spent hours in his cluttered shop, looking at books and asking him things, and sniffing the fine papers there, and even sitting copying
things from books he would suggest I use at his worktable, with his compliments and his ink and often his paper. In other words, he was polite and generous to me, and I liked him.

When I told that to Georges and Henriette Connes, many years after I had stopped being a student, and after old Monsieur Venot had died and left a lot of money to a host of people nobody ever knew he would spit upon, they laughed with a tolerant if amused astonishment; and of course I too know that by now I am much shyer than I was then, or perhaps only less ignorant, and that I would not dream of accepting so blandly an old miser’s generosity and wisdom.

In Monsieur Venot’s shop I learned to like French books better than any others. They bent to the hand and had to be cut, page by page. I liked that; having to work to earn the reward, cutting impatiently through the cheap paper of a “train novel,” the kind bought in railroad stations to be thrown away and then as often kept for many years, precious for one reason or another. I always liked the way the paper crumbled a little onto my lap or my blanket or my plate, along the edges of each page.

All the streets of this old quarter off the place d’Armes were narrow and crooked and teeming with life behind their shuttered windows, and from our rooms on the rue du Petit-Potet we could hear fourteen or more bells ringing from the many small churches and convents. Between our house and the place d’Armes there was the Palais du Justice, which always filled me with a feeling of horror for the crimes that had been tried there for so many centuries. It was a very old and noble building, though, with a great hall made all of wood. Some of the streets in this part of the city had names like the Street of the Good Little Children; and they became more familar to me than any I would ever know. Later when we moved to rue Monge we were still in the older part of the town but down by the canals and the River Saône.

The town was to become more familiar to me than any other place I had ever lived in before, or since. And I feel I could survive there now as easily as I did the first three years, in spite of the inevitable changes that the short time of some sixty years can make in place as old as Dijon was and is.

(1913–)

from
TAMRART
:
THIRTEEN DAYS IN THE SAHARA

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE

The shapes come on us, loom over us, grow on us and before we can come to an understanding of them or with them have been replaced by something in a different idiom. Yet it’s not clouds we’re experiencing, it’s rock, and more and more rock but some memory or dream from billions of years ago seems not to have altogether subsided in them. This one here now, a grocer’s calendar’s worth, could it have been breathing, or settling ever so slightly, as we came around into full view of it? Farther on we seem to be endlessly skirting the universe’s largest
watermelon, the end of which is going to be a fenceful of razor blades ripping through half the sky. Gone in no time, not gone from sight but from our vicinity; come over some little rise and the mountains have all popped far away to the very outmost rim of our vision, and we have miles and miles of perfect flatness to cross, carpeted solidly however with numberless, that is up to where nobody counts, little dark grey rocks, maybe two or three pounds apiece, a jumble of them as far as eye can see, gravel for super-giants. We’re told this beauty spot is called the Stomach of Heaven, Le Ventre du Ciel, and indeed you could believe that we are inside, not on the outside of something, although to a mind reared on old-fashioned Christian imagery the space can seem more infernal than beatific; whether enclosed or not, it is obviously without exit and so a good picture of hell according to J. P. Sartre. It will never end, we are going to go on and on, the most stalwart walkers among us tire eventually; even Mme. Never Say Die, she of the cigarettes and the clenched will and the soul in perpetual flight, gives up and mounts her camel. Not an inch of us is uncovered, the slits for our eyes are paned with dark glasses; our white chèches are nearly solid black with flies, which strangely do not bite; they are no doubt waiting to get us all tumbled in a heap humans and quadrupeds together off the edge of this monstrous concoction of a plateau and enjoy their meal in peace.

Of course we know no more than other mortals of the regulations from on high, but by this time we do begin to know some of the little procedural rules, such as the aforementioned requirement of something for the camels to munch wherever we stop for lunch or for the night: a terrific job each time, incidentally, of unloading and re-loading and getting saddles off and on but it is never neglected, no camel is ever let off to browse with a load on its back. A pipe dream this time. Obviously there is going to be nothing to browse on and therefore no chance of our stopping for at least the next two thousand years.

Right buttock in splinters? shift to the left; left no better? try leaning back; oops, there goes that neck and your feet with it for a scratch on the rump ahead, just as Moussa bringing up the rear and either under orders to keep us all at a brisk pace or with some individual tick of personality having the same effect, clucks us in the rearguard into a
peril- and panic-fraught trot. Yell for mercy, hang on for dear life but that’s a hollow figure of speech when life’s not looking dear or even tolerable and there’s nothing to hang on to; the decorative object at the front of the saddle is not made to serve as a pummel, still less life support. For sanity’s sake resume vision of formation of that plain, which to the ignorant eye looks volcanic but what kind of volcano would spew out lava chunks like that, in numbers to vie with galaxies and the national budget?

And now comes a mirage. What else could it be? The rock-strewn tableland stretching to infinity has simply removed itself, the bordering mountain that moved forward with it too, and we are winding instead down a gentle slope with a small oued and a smattering of acacias at the bottom, just right for lunch. A little sand there, not much; bare curving big slabs of reddish rock beyond, nice to stroke or contemplate, nothing to overpower digestion.

Dream sequences all, they are playing with you, they the cat, you the mouse. You don’t know what it is that is being stretched in your guts, in your vision. The word, the idea of
travel
would not even be a bad joke at this point, it could make you vomit. Nothing to do with danger of course, nobody’s looking for trouble or really risking any on this trip, except Jeepers and he’s just constituted that way and would be doing the same anywhere. But a cat’s claws are sliding up over that mountain’s crest and it’s after YOU. You mean it’s like those posters some of us can remember, about joining the marines? Or you mean what’s happening to you is like True Love, the personal Big Bang that changes the nature, the very constituent materials of everything? Exactly. Only not the coup de foudre. I’d say this is more the slow sulphurous type of illumination, leading however to the same result.