Lonesome Traveler (19 page)

To cap it all, when the train came there were absolutely no seats and I had to ride all night in the cold vestibule.— When I got sleepy I had to flatten my rucksack on the cold-iron vestibule doors and I lay there curled, legs up, as we rushed through the unseen Provences and Burgundys of the gnashing French map.— Six thousand francs for this great privilege.

AH BUT IN THE MORNING, the suburbs of Paris, the dawn spreading over the moody Seine (like a little canal), the boats on the river, the outer industrial smokes of the city, then the Gare de Lyon and when I stepped
out on Boulevard Diderot I thought seeing one glimpse of long boulevards leading every direction with great eight-story ornate apartments with monarchial façades, “Yes, they made themselves a
city!”
—Then crossing Boulevard Diderot to have coffee, good
espresso
coffee and
croissants
in a big city place full of workingmen, and through the glass I could see women in full long dresses rushing to work on motorbikes, and men with silly crash helmets (
La Sporting France
), taxis, broad old cobblestoned streets, and that nameless city smell of coffee, antiseptics and wine.

Walking, thence, in a cold brisk-red morning, over the Austerlitz Bridge, past the Zoo on the Quai St.Bernard where one little old deer stood in the morning dew, then past the Sorbonne, and my first sight of Notre Dame strange as a lost dream.— And when I saw a big rimed woman statue on Boulevard St.-Germain I remembered my dream that I was once a French school-boy in Paris.— I stopped at a cafe, ordered Cinzano, and realized the racket of going-to-work was the same here as in Houston or in Boston and no better—but I felt a vast promise, endless streets, streets, girls, places, meanings, and I could understand why Americans stayed here, some for lifetimes.— And the first man in Paris I had looked at in the Gare de Lyon was a dignified Negro in a Homburg.

What endless human types passed my cafe table: old French ladies, Malay girls, schoolboys, blond boys going to college, tall young brunettes headed for the law classes, hippy pimply secretaries, bereted goggled clerks, bereted scarved carriers of milk bottles, dikes in long blue laboratory coats, frowning older students striding in trench coats like in Boston, seedy little cops (in blue caps) fishing through their pockets, cute pony-tailed blondes in high heels with zip notebooks, goggled bicyclists with motors attached to the rear of their cycles,
bespectacled Homburgs walking around reading
he Parisien
and breathing mist, bushyheaded mulattoes with long cigarettes in their mouths, old ladies carrying milk cans and shopping bags, rummy W. C. Fieldses spitting in the gutter and with hands-a-pockets going to their shops for another day, a young Chinese-looking French girl of twelve with separated teeth almost in tears (frowning, and with a bruise on her shin, schoolbooks in hand, cute and serious like Negro girls in Greenwich Village), porkpie executive running and catching his bus sensationally and vanishing with it, mustachioed longhaired Italian youths coming in the bar for their morning shot of wine, huge bumbling bankers of the Bourse in expensive suits fishing for newspaper pennies in their palms (bumping into women at the bus stop), serious thinkers with pipes and packages, a lovely redhead with dark glasses trotting pip pip on her heels to the bus, and a waitress slopping mop water in the gutter, —

Ravishing brunettes with tight-fitting skirts. School-girlies with long boyish bobs plirping lips over books and memorizing lessons fidgetly (waiting to meet young Marcel Proust in the park after school), lovely young girls of seventeen walking with low-heeled sure strides in long red coats to downtown Paris.— An apparent East Indian, whistling, leading a dog on a leash.— Serious young lovers, boy arming girl's shoulders.— Statue of Danton pointing nowhere, Paris hepcat in dark glasses faintly mustached waiting there.— Little suited boy in black beret, with well-off father going to morning joys.

The next day I strolled down Boulevard St.Germain in a spring wind, turned in at the church of St.-Thomas-d'Aquin and saw a huge gloomy painting on the wall showing a warrior, fallen off his horse, being stabbed in the heart by an enemy, at whom he looked
directly with sad understanding Gallk eyes and one hand outheld as if to say, “It's my life” (it had that Delacroix horror). I meditated on this painting in the bright colorful Champs-filysees and watched the multitudes go by. Glum I walked past a movie house advertising
War and Peace
, where two Russian-sabered sablecaped grenadiers chatted amiably and in French come-on with two American women tourists.

Long walks down the boulevards with a flask of cognac.— Each night a different room, each day four hours to find a room, on foot with full pack.— In the skid-row sections of Paris numerous frowsy dames said
“complet”
coldly when I asked for unheated cockroach rooms in the gray Paris gloom.— I walked and hurried angrily bumping people along the Seine.— In little cafes I had compensatory steaks and wine, chewing slowly.

Noon, a café near Les Halles, onion soup,
fate de maison
and bread, for a quarter.— Afternoon, the girls in fur coats along Boulevard St.-Denis, perfumed.—
“Monsieur?”

“Sure….”

Finally I found a room I could keep for all of three days, a dismal dirty cold hovel hotel run by two Turkish pimps but the kindest fellows I'd met yet in Paris. Here, window open to dreary rains of April, I slept my best sleeps and gathered strength for daily twenty-mile hikes around the Queen of Cities.

But the next day I was suddenly unaccountably happy as I sat in the park in front of Trinite Church near Gare St.-Lazare among children and then went inside and saw a mother praying with a devotion that startled her son.— A moment later I saw a tiny mother with a barelegged little son already as tall as she.

I walked around, it started to sleet on Pigalle, suddenly the sun broke out on Rochechouart and I discovered
Montmartre.— Now I knew where I would live if I ever came back to Paris.— Carousels for children, marvelous markets,
hors d'oeuvres
stalls, wine-barrel stores, cafés at the foot of the magnificent white Sacré-Coeur basilica, lines of women and children waiting for hot German crullers, new Norman cider inside.—Beautiful girls coming home from parochial school.—A place to get married and raise a family, narrow happy streets full of children carrying long loaves of bread.— For a quarter I bought a huge chunk of Gruyere cheese from a stall, then a huge chunk of jellied meat delicious as crime, then in a bar a quiet glass of port, and then I went to see the church high on the cliff looking down on the rain-wet roofs of Paris.—

La Basilique du Sacré-Coeur de Jesus is beauteous, maybe in its way one of the most beautiful of all churches (if you have a rococo soul as I have): blood-red crosses in the stainedglass windows with a westerly sun sending golden shafts against opposite bizarre Byzantine blues representing other sacristies—regular blood baths in the blue sea—and all the poor sad plaques commemorating the building of the church after the sack by Bismarck.

Down the hill in the rain, I went to a magnificent restaurant on Rue de Clignancourt and had that unbeatable French pureed soup and a whole meal with a basket of French bread and my wine and the thin-stemmed glasses I had dreamed about.— Looking across the restaurant at the shy thighs of a newlywed girl having her big honeymoon supper with her young farmer husband, neither of them saying anything.— Fifty years of this they'd do now in some provincial kitchen or dining room.— The sun breaking through again, and with full belly I wandered among the shooting galleries and carousels of Montmartre and I saw
a young mother hugging her little girlie with a doll, bouncing her and laughing and hugging her because they had had so much fun on the hobbyhorse and I saw Dostoevski's divine love in her eyes (and above on the hill over Montmartre, He held out His arms).

Feeling wonderful now, I strolled about and cashed a traveler's check at the Gare du Nord and walked all the way, gay and fine, down Boulevard de Magenta to the huge Place de la Republique and on down, cutting sometimes into side streets.— Night now, down Boulevard du Temple and Avenue Voltaire (peeking into windows of obscure Breton restaurants) to Boulevard Beaumarchais where I thought I'd see the gloomy Bastille prison but I didn't even know it was torn down in 1789 and asked a guy,
“Ou est la vieille prison de la Revolution?”
and he laughed and told me there were a few remnant stones in the subway station.— Then down in the subway: amazing clean artistic ads, imagine an ad for wine in America showing a naked ten-year-old girl with a party hat coiled around a bottle of wine.— And the amazing map that lights up and shows your route in colored buttons when you press the destination button.— Imagine the New York I.R.T. And the clean trains, a bum on a bench in a clean surrealistic atmosphere (not to be compared with the 14th Street stop on the Canarsie line).

Paris paddywagons flew by singing
dee
da,
dee
da.—

The next day I strolled examining bookstores and went into the Benjamin Franklin Library, the site of the old Cafe Voltaire (facing the Comedie Française) where everybody from Voltaire to Gauguin to Scott Fitzgerald drank and now the scene of prim American librarians with no expression.— Then I strolled to the Pantheon and had delicious pea soup and a small steak in a fine crowded restaurant full of students and
vegetarian law professors.— Then I sat in a little park in Place Paul-Painleve and dreamily watched a curving row of beautiful rosy tulips rigid and swaying fat shaggy sparrows, beautiful short-haired
mademoiselles
strolling by. It's not that French girls are beautiful, it's their cute mouths and the sweet way they talk French (their mouths pout rosily), the way they've perfected the short haircut and the way they amble slowly when they walk, with great sophistication, and of course their chic way of dressing and undressing.

Paris, a stab in the heart finally.

THE LOUVRE—MILES AND MILES of hiking before great canvases.

In David's immense canvas of Napoleon I and Pius VII I could see little altar boys far in the back fondling a maréchal's sword hilt (the scene is Notre-Dame-de-Paris, with the Empress Josephine kneeling pretty as a boulevard girl). Fragonard, so delicate next to Van Dyck, and a big smoky Rubens (
La Mort de Dido
).—But the Rubens got better as I looked, the muscle tones in cream and pink, the rimshot luminous eyes, the dull purple velvet robe on the bed. Rubens was happy because nobody was posing for him for a fee and his gay
Kermesse
showed an old drunk about to be sick.— Goya's
Marquesa de la Solaria
could hardly have been more modern, her silver fat shoes pointed like fish crisscrossed, the immense diaphanous pink ribbons over a sisterly pink face.— A typical French woman (not educated) suddenly said, “Ah,
c'est trop beau!”
“It's too beautiful!”

But Brueghel, wow! His
Battle of Arbelles
had at least 600 faces clearly defined in an impossibly confused mad battle leading nowhere.— No wonder Céline loved him.— A complete understanding of world madness,
thousands of clearly
defined
figures with swords
and
above them the calm mountains, trees on a hill, clouds, and everyone laughed when they saw that insane masterpiece that afternoon, they knew what it meant.

And Rembrandt.— The dim trees in the darkness of crepuscule chateau with its hints of a Transylvanian vampire castle.— Set side by side with this his
Hanging Beef
was completely modern with its splash of blood paint. Rembrandt's brushstroke swirled in the face of the
Christ at Emmaus
, and the floor in
Sainte Famille
was completely detailed in the color of planks and nails.— Why should anyone paint after Rembrandt, unless Van Gogh? The
Philosopher in Meditation
was my favorite for its Beethoven shadows and light, I liked also
Hermit Reading
with his soft old brow, and
St. Matthew Being Inspired by the Angel
was a miracle—the rough strokes, and the drip of red paint in the angel's lower lip and the saint's own rough hands ready to write the Gospel… ah miraculous too the veil of mistaken angel smoke on Tobias' departing angel's left arm.— What can you do?

Suddenly I walked into the 19th Century room and there was an explosion of light—of bright gold and daylight. Van Gogh, his crazy blue Chinese church with the hurrying woman, the secret of it the Japanese spontaneous brushstroke that, for instance, made the woman's back show, her back all white unpainted canvas except for a few black thick script strokes.— Then the madness of blue running in the roof where Van Gogh had a ball—I could see the joy red mad gladness he rioted in in that church heart.— His maddest picture was gardens with insane trees whirling in the blue swirl sky, one tree finally exploding into just black lines, almost silly but divine—the thick curls and butter burls of color, beautiful oil rusts, glubs, creams, greens.

I studied Degas' ballet pictures—how serious the perfect faces in the orchestra, then suddenly the explosion on the stage—the pink film rose of the ballerina gowns, the puffs of color.— And Cezanne, who painted exactly as he saw, more accurate and less divine than holy Van Gogh—his green apples, his crazy blue lake with acrostics in it, his trick of hiding perspective (one jetty in the lake can do it, and one mountain line). Gauguin—seeing him beside these masters, he seemed to me almost like a clever cartoonist.— Compared to Renoir, too, whose painting of a French afternoon was so gorgeously colored with the Sunday afternoon of all our childhood dreams—pinks, purples, reds, swings, dancers, tables, rosy cheeks and bubble laughter.

On the way out of the bright room, Frans Hals, the gayest of all painters who ever lived. Then one last look at Rembrandt's St. Matthew's angel—its smeared red mouth
moved
when I looked.