Fly-Fishing the 41st (6 page)

The sculptures themselves, besides being sublime and terrifying, were dangerous to carry, for they had all kinds of sharp objects protruding from them—scythe blades, giant hooks, spears, knives, and chains. You had the sense that if you fell on one you'd be impaled and bleed to death.

All of the sculptures of flies and fish were imaginative and brilliant, but one in particular was, to my mind, a masterpiece. Pierre thought so too, and said so when we had set it up and were standing beside it.

“This one I think is his best work. It really is remarkable. François calls it
le grand bécard vainqueur!
The great male salmon that won. The head”—Pierre pointed—“is the actual head of a salmon that I caught in the Baltic and brought back for François, and the fishing reels in its stomach are mine too.”

The sculpture depicted a large salmon with its tail touching its head as if it were leaping in triumph. Its body was a series of curved wires creating a cavity that could be seen into like a cage. Its tail was a fishing-rod handle, and an explosion of various lures hung on spiraling lathe chips. Its pectoral fins were large
gaffing hooks. Its air bladder was a gas tank from an old French motorcycle, its intestine was a scythe blade, and in its stomach were the various items of the fisherman's kit—reels of different shapes and colors, lures, flies, and a landing net. They symbolized a salmon that had overcome all the obstacles it faced on its journey up the river from the ocean; it had swallowed all the anglers' tackle, broken their lines, and cursed the industry of man.

 

Pierre and I were on Ile Saint-Louis the next morning with our lines in the water. Pierre fished with a worm and gave me a heavy rod rigged with a big lure for
silure.

“I think Jean-Pierre and Guy are fishing at Neuilly,” he said. He picked up his cell phone to call Guy to get a report.

“What? Yes, Guy? Two bream, no
silure,
okay. What?
Vraiment?
Okay,
à tout à l'heure.
” Pierre put the phone in his pocket, laughing and shaking his head.

“Did they catch anything?”

“They caught two bream and Jean-Pierre hooked an ear.”

“An ear?” I asked, thinking I'd heard wrong.

“Yes, apparently,” Pierre said, casting.

“You mean a human ear?”

“That's what he said.”

“What did they do with it? Are they going to tell anybody?”

“What, and cause trouble? They are just fishermen.”

 

After an hour of fishing we'd caught nothing so we left to be at the exhibition early—it was the first morning that it was open to the public.

Pierre spent the morning trying to sell exotic bird skins to Dutch fly tiers who used the feathers to make salmon flies. “We don't need parrots and blue chatterers,” one said.

“How about these bustard feathers,” Pierre offered.

“They are no good to us without the matching feather from the opposite wing.”

“Five thousand francs for all of them then,” Pierre said.

“You are asking too much, Pierre,” one responded. “Your birds are not in very good shape.” They turned the birds over and over in their hands and folded the skins to expose the feathers and show how sparse they were. “I would take all of the skins for a thousand francs and even that I think is a lot.”

“One thousand francs?” Pierre gasped, tucking his chin in close to his neck and lifting his shoulders, trying to sound insulted. “They're worth more than that; I could get minimum three thousand and that would be a great price.”

François, in the meantime, was standing amid his art wearing his green ostrich leather vest, his pipe between his teeth, and a glass of white wine in his hand. He stood beside the only other artist selling art there, a beautiful woman named Marie-Annick who did lovely pastels of fish.

“Did you catch anything this morning, James?” François asked me.

“No, not a bite.”

“I love fishing in the Seine but only in the summer,” François shared. “I never catch fish with Pierre this time of year.”

Fishermen walked by the art mounted on stands and hanging on the walls, but only François's friends stopped to look for very long. “They're not interested in art,” said Marie-Annick. François poured her a glass of wine.

“It's true,” François confirmed, opening another bottle. “They're only interested in the latest technology in rods and reels. They've lost their purpose; they've become too removed from real fishing. I love fly-fishing, but they should try bait once in a while. It's more tactile.” He took out a pouch, stuffed his pipe, and looked vacantly at the room, pretending that he hadn't just made a philosophical statement or was even capable of making one.

I left François and Marie-Annick briefly to look at a sculpture he had done of a big
silure.
Staring into its mouth, which was wide enough to accommodate a dinner platter, I began to enact the ritual in my mind of catching one, as prehistoric men once made drawings of the hunt and their prey on the walls of caves the day before leaving to kill.

“The fishing should be good tomorrow,” Pierre commented, stopping by to share a glass of wine. “It's raining right now. The river must be rising, and the strong current will force the bream to move into the eddy.” He drank his wine. “The big
silure
will follow. When the bream are in thick, there are so many you can't bring a lure through the water without snagging one. The
silure
get in a frenzy. They herd the bream and sometimes push them to the surface, where they stun them with their giant tails and eat them.” Pierre saw in my excited glance that his enthusiasm had been successfully contagious. “We'll fish every morning until we get one,” he assured me.

 

The next morning I walked to Ile Saint-Louis alone to go fishing, and passed only two people on the way: green-uniformed workers picking up garbage in front of Notre-Dame. Pierre came on his bicycle an hour later. The bells on the cathedral echoed off the river.

I was leaning against a black lamppost when I got a tug on my lure, but all that I reeled in was my lure with silvery fish scales stuck to the hook. “The bream are in,” I heard Pierre say to himself. “The
silure
should be too.” But they did not come to my lure that morning.

“Tomorrow we will get serious,” Pierre promised.

 

At the expo that day, the final day of the show, I was consumed by François's sculpture of the salmon,
le grand bécard vainqueur.
It assured its viewer that the fish was a worthy adversary.

After eating lunch, Pierre and I walked in the rain to a fish market on rue Mazarin to buy mackerel and squid for
silure
bait.

“When I decide to do something, I do it seriously,” Pierre said.

 

That night we prepared all the gear—six rods, hooks and weights, folding chairs, an umbrella, and wading boots—and stowed it in Pierre's van.

“Don't you want to refrigerate that?” I asked Pierre as he loaded the mackerel and squid into a canvas bag.

“No,” he replied, “I want it to stink.”

By seven the next morning we were on Ile Saint-Louis. By seven-thirty all six lines were rigged and set in the water.

At that hour in February it was still dark; the lampposts were lit and the city was quiet. A light drizzle fell on my face as I stretched out on a marble bench and closed my eyes. After a few minutes I lifted my head to see if Pierre was still there. I looked around, and in my half-awake and half-asleep state, the current of the river going by the island gave the illusion that I was aboard a moving ship. I also had the sensation that the ship was sinking, because the river was almost visibly rising from seven days of on-and-off rain.

Near sunrise, Pierre picked up one of the rods and jigged for zander. On the second cast, he retrieved the lure with a fish scale—slightly oblong with a mother-of-pearl brilliance—stuck on the hook. “Bream!” he exclaimed prophetically. “It's a good sign for
silure.
”

At this pronouncement, I stared at the lines with new hope, which lasted for about five minutes. My eyes were averted to traffic on the voie Georges Pompidou—the morning migration of Parisians to the west side of the city.

When there was enough light to read by, Pierre pulled out a day-old copy of
Le Monde.
He read for two minutes, and then looked up at the lines. “Shit!” he yelled. “Where are the
silure?
We have done everything right here, and the conditions are perfect. If the rain
keeps up they will have to close the expressway. Look, it'll be just a couple feet before it's underwater!” He walked over to our bait supply and, chopping several mackerel in pieces, started chumming the eddy. “Well, at least we are not stuck in traffic,” he conceded, his bloodied hands throwing chunks of fish into the river.

“Shi-it, where are the
silure?
”

Several minutes passed.

Pierre laughed as he looked toward the right bank. “There is one now.” He pointed to a long barge on the cabin of which was printed in block letters,
Le Silure.
It was one of two sanitation barges for the city of Paris that clean the dog feces off the quays and scoop up floating debris, named after the bottom-feeding omnivore we were in pursuit of.

As the morning grew brighter, joggers ran by us around the tip of the island. People walked their dogs on leashes. The dogs sniffed our bait and tangled their feet in our lines. Shortly, the sanitation barge moored to the island with a large metal ring. A man in a green suit jumped out and began to hose down the cobbles. The bells at Notre-Dame and other nearby churches sounded nine-thirty.

M
EANWHILE IN
R
OUEN
—M
ONET AND THE
F
ISH IN
H
IS
L
ILY
P
OND

W
hen I next talked to Yannid in Rouen she had just finished stitching a man who was hemorrhaging badly after a car accident. The medical students practiced on cases that were more or less terminal. “He died underneath me,” Yannid lamented. “That's the first time that happened.”

I had returned to Rouen to await the spring and to be with Yannid.

Every day that went by I noticed the sun was stronger, and the tips of the willow branches were greening. The early leaves on the chestnut trees along the river spread from the branches in formations resembling the soft paws of a pouncing snow cat. I told myself that I would not let the emergence of spring pass without watching it closely.

I spent many mild mornings by the river reading or drawing in my sketchbook. Sometimes I was caught in a brief downpour, only to return to the apartment wet. Yannid would see my book warped from the rain and ask why I had not sought refuge under the bridge by the river. I never had a good answer.

 

Two weeks into April, Yannid kept her promise to show me the Norman countryside in spring. We packed weekend bags and drove to her aunt's house, a mansion near Etrépagny. Her aunt, who lived alone, was away and had left us the key to the house with instructions to feed her dog and water the garden.

When we arrived at the large redbrick home, Yannid took me inside and led me upstairs to a guest room on the third floor where she used to stay in summer as a girl. After a time lying in the bed and then napping with the window open, we decided to put aside serious talk about the future and take a walk.

Yannid led me to her aunt's garden, where she took off her shoes and walked barefoot on the soil between rows of gooseberries. I thought then, just by the way she stood there, that Yannid would not mind very much when I left France to continue on my trip.

That night for dinner we cooked a duck marinated in raspberry wine. Neither of us ate very much, though we managed to share two bottles of good Bordeaux from her aunt's cellar. After the wine, we strolled outside in the dark under a nearly full moon. Standing at the edge of the garden again, Yannid kissed me. We returned to the
house holding hands and reaffirmed our affection for each other in the guest room on the third floor.

The next morning Yannid rose early and collected brown eggs from the chicken coop by the garden. She cooked a large omelette and we ate heartily without saying much.

After breakfast we drove to Giverny to see the house and garden of the painter Claude Monet. The day was warm and held fragrances in the air. Yannid stopped to smell a blossom on our walk through the garden to Monet's pond of water lilies.

The pond, we discovered, was fed by a channel from a cold spring-fed trout stream. Yannid sat by the stream to enjoy its refreshing coolness and I sat next to her. She leaned over and kissed me. We had talked little that day so it surprised me when she spoke.

“Hey, there's a fish down there,” she said, glancing into the water.

“Where?” I asked, for I couldn't see it at first.

“Below us there.”

“You're right,” I said, and took Yannid's hand and kissed it. “It's a trout.”

I nestled my face in the crook of her neck and thought about driving back to Rouen for my rod, but it was a nice relief just to watch the trout and not have to catch it.

“It's nice just to watch it,” Yannid noted.

“I was thinking the same thing,” I agreed. We walked back through the garden to see Monet's house.

It was clear from looking at his paintings, especially his late work, that Monet saw infinite possibilities in depicting the way that water abstracted the willows and the sky and wove all their colors into its reflections. The walls of his home were hung almost exclusively with Japanese prints (many by Hiroshige), almost all of which depicted water, fish, or fishermen.

“Why didn't he paint the fish?” I asked Yannid later that day as we stared at several large carp in the lily pond.