Neither Here Nor There (7 page)

Katz was in a tetchy frame of mind throughout most of our stay in Paris. He was convinced everything was out to get him. On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later.

Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror – he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ just because he had inadvertently probed some dog shit with the tip of his finger – and with only a mumbled ‘Wait here’ walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo’s, but he appeared to have regained his composure. ‘I’m ready now,’ he announced.

Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it
really
shit. I don’t want to get too graphic, in case you’re snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you’ll get the picture. ‘Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,’ I observed helpfully.

Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of passers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a windcheater with the hood up. ‘Just don’t say a word,’ he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed to Paris after that.

With the Louvre packed I went instead to the new – new to me, at any rate – Musée d’Orsay, on the Left Bank opposite the Tuileries. When I had last passed it, sixteen years before, it had been a derelict hulk, the shell of the old Gare d’Orsay, but some person of vision had decided to restore the old station as a museum and it is simply wonderful, both as a building and as a collection of pictures. I spent two happy hours there, and afterwards checked out the situation at the Louvre – still hopelessly crowded – and instead went to the Pompidou Centre, which I was determined to try to like, but I couldn’t. Everything about it seemed wrong. For one thing it was a bit weathered and faded, like a child’s toy that has been left out over winter, which surprised me because it is only a dozen years old and the government had just spent £40 million refurbishing it, but I guess that’s what you get when you build with plastic. And it seemed much too overbearing a structure for its cramped neighbourhood. It would be an altogether different building in a park.

But what I really dislike about buildings like the Pompidou Centre, and Paris is choking on them, is that they are just showing off. Here’s Richard Rogers saying to the world, ‘Look, I put all the pipes on the
outside.
Am I cute enough to kiss?’ I could excuse that if some consideration were given to function. No one seems to have thought what the Pompidou Centre should do – that it should be a gathering place, a haven, because inside it’s just crowded and confusing. It has none of the sense of space and light and majestic calm of the Musée d’Orsay. It’s like a department store on the first day of a big sale. There’s hardly any place to sit and no focal point – no big clock or anything – at which to meet someone. It has no heart.

Outside it’s no better. The main plaza on the Rue St-Martin is in the shade during the best part of the day and is built on a slope, so it’s dark and the rain never dries and again there’s no place to sit. If they had made the slope into a kind of amphitheatre, people could sit on the steps, but now if you sit down you feel as if you are going to slide to the bottom.

I have nothing against novelty in buildings – I am quite taken with the glass pyramid at the Louvre and those buildings at La Défense that have the huge holes in the middle – but I just hate the way architects and city planners and everyone else responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for. They are for people. That seems obvious enough, but for half a century we have been building cities that are for almost anything else: for cars, for businesses, for developers, for people with money and bold visions who refuse to see cities from ground level, as places in which people must live and function and get around. Why should I have to walk through a damp tunnel and negotiate two sets of stairs to get across a busy street? Why should cars be given priority over me? How can we be so rich and so stupid at the same time? It is the curse of our century – too much money, too little sense – and the Pompidou seems to me a kind of celebration of that in plastic.

One evening I walked over to the Place de la République and had a nostalgic dinner at a bistro called Le Thermomètre. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in the Hotel Moderne across the way (now a Holiday Inn, alas, alas) and dined nightly at the Thermomètre because it was cheap and we had next to no money. I had spent the whole of my savings, some £18, on a suit for the wedding – a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn’t see my legs move – and had to borrow £12 spending money from my father-in-law in order, as I pointed out, to keep his daughter from starving during her first week of married life.

I expected the Thermomètre to be full of happy memories, but I couldn’t remember anything about it at all, except that it had the fiercest toilet attendant in Paris, a woman who looked like a Russian wrestler – a male Russian wrestler – and who sat at a table in the basement with a pink dish full of small coins and craned her head to watch you while you had a pee to make sure you didn’t dribble on the tiles or pocket any of the urinal cakes. It is hard enough to pee when you are aware that someone’s eyes are on you, but when you fear that at any moment you will be felled by a rabbit chop to the kidneys for taking too much time, you seize up altogether. My urine turned solid. You couldn’t have cleared my system with Draino. So eventually I would hoist up my zip and return unrelieved to the table, and spend the night doing a series of Niagara Falls impressions back at the hotel. The toilet attendant, I’m pleased to say, was no longer there. There was no toilet attendant at all these days. No urinal cakes either, come to that.

It took me two or three days to notice it, but the people of Paris have become polite over the last twenty years. They don’t exactly rush up and embrace you and thank you for winning the war for them, but they have certainly become more patient and accommodating. The cab drivers are still complete jerks, but everyone else – shopkeepers, waiters, the police – seemed almost friendly. I even saw a waiter smile once. And somebody held open a door for me instead of letting it bang in my face.

It began to unsettle me. Then on my last night, as I was strolling near the Seine, a well-dressed family of two adults and two teenage children swept past me on the narrow pavement and without breaking stride or interrupting their animated conversation flicked me into the gutter. I could have hugged them.

On the morning of my departure I trudged through a grey rain to the Gare de Lyon to get a cab to the Gare du Nord and a train to Brussels. Because of the rain, there were no cabs so I stood and waited. For five minutes I was the only person there, but gradually other people came along and took places behind me.

When at last a cab arrived and pulled up directly in front of me, I was astonished to discover that seventeen grown men and women believed they had a perfect right to try to get in ahead of me. A middle-aged man in a cashmere coat who was obviously wealthy and well-educated actually laid hands on me. I maintained possession by making a series of aggrieved Gallic honking noises – ‘Mais non! Mais non!’ – and using my bulk to block the door. I leaped in, resisting the chance to catch the pushy man’s tie in the door and let him trot along with us to the Gare du Nord, and just told the driver to get me the hell out of there. He looked at me as if I were a large, imperfectly formed piece of shit, and with a disgusted sigh engaged first gear. I was glad to see some things never change.

I got off at the wrong station in Brussels, which is easy to do if you are a little bit stupid and you have been dozing and you awake with a start to see a platform sign outside the window that says
BRUXELLES.
I leaped up in a mild panic and hastened to the exit, knocking passengers on the head with my rucksack as I passed, and sprang Peter Pan-like onto the platform just as the train threw a steamy whoosh! at my legs and pulled out.

It didn’t strike me as odd that I was the only passenger to alight at the station, or that the station itself was eerily deserted, until I stepped outside, into that gritty drizzle that hangs perpetually over Brussels, and realized I was in a part of the city I had never seen before: one of those anonymous neighbourhoods where the buildings are grey and every end wall has a three-storey advertisement painted on it and the shops sell things like swimming-pool pumps and signs that say
NO PARKING – GARAGE IN CONSTANT USE.
I had wanted Bruxelles Centrale and would have settled for the Gare du Nord or the Gare du Midi or even the obscure Gare Josaphat, but this was none of these, and I had no idea where I was. I set my face in a dogged expression and trudged towards what I thought might be the downtown – a hint of tall buildings on a distant, drizzly horizon.

I had been to Brussels a couple of times before and thought I knew the city reasonably well, so I kept telling myself that any minute I would start to recognize things, and sometimes I even said, ‘Say, that looks kind of familiar,’ and would trudge a quarter of a mile to what I thought might be the back of the Palais de Justice but which proved in the event to be a dog-food factory. I walked and walked down long streets that never changed character or even acquired any, just endless blocks of grey sameness, which Brussels seems to possess in greater abundance than almost anywhere else in Europe.

I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, ‘You want to go
where
? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is
Lille,
you dumb shit,’ then stop other passers-by and say, ‘You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,’ and that I’ll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on. Just when I reached the point where I was beginning to think seriously about phoning my wife and asking her to come and find me (‘And listen, honey, bring some Yorkies and the Sunday papers’), I turned a corner and there to my considerable surprise was the Manneken-Pis, the chubby little statue of a naked boy having a pee, the inexpressibly naff symbol of the city, and suddenly I knew where I was and all my little problems melted. I celebrated by buying a Manneken-Pis cake plate and a family-sized Toblerone at one of the 350 souvenir shops that line the street, and felt better still.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in a room at the Hotel Adolphe Sax, lying on the bed with my shoes on (disintegrating into a hermitic slobbiness is one of the incidental pleasures of solitary travel), breaking my teeth on the Toblerone (who invented those things?) and watching some daytime offering on BBCl – a panel discussion involving people who were impotent or from Wolverhampton or suffering some other personal catastrophe, the precise nature of which eludes me now – and in half an hour was feeling sufficiently refreshed to venture out into Brussels.

I always stay in the Sax because it gets BBCl on the TV and because the lifts are so interesting, a consideration that I was reminded of now as I stood in the corridor beside an illuminated Down button, passing the time, as one does, by humming the Waiting for the Elevator Song (‘Doo dee doo dee doo dee doo doo’) and wondering idly why hotel hallway carpet is always
so
ugly.

Generally speaking, they don’t understand elevators in Europe. Even in the newer buildings the elevators are almost always painfully slow and often lack certain features that are elsewhere considered essential, like an inside door, so that if you absent-mindedly lean forward you are likely to end up with one arm twenty-seven feet longer than the other. But even by these standards the lifts at the Sax are exceptional.

You get in intending to go downstairs for breakfast, but find that the lift descends without instructions past the lobby, past the underground garage and basement and down to an unmarked sub-basement where the doors open briefly to reveal a hall full of steam and toiling coolies. As you fiddle uselessly with the buttons (which are obviously not connected to anything), the doors clang shut and, with a sudden burst of vigour, the elevator shoots upwards to the eleventh floor at a speed that makes your face feel as if it is melting, pauses for a tantalizing half-second, drops ten feet, pauses again and then freefalls to the lobby. You emerge, blood trickling from your ears, and walk with as much dignity as you can muster into the dining-room.

So you can perhaps conceive my relief at finding now that the lift conveyed me to my destination without incident apart from an unscheduled stop at the second floor and a brief, but not unpleasant, return trip to the fourth.

Brussels, it must be said, is not the greatest of cities for venturing. After Paris, it was a relief just to cross a street without feeling as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my butt, but once you’ve done a couple of circuits of the Grand-Place and looked politely in the windows of one or two of the many thousands of shops selling chocolates or lace (and they appear to sell nothing else in Brussels), you begin to find yourself glancing at your watch and wondering if nine-forty-seven in the morning is too early to start drinking.

I settled instead for another circuit of the Grand-Place. It is fetching, no doubt about it. It is the centrepiece of the city, a nicely proportioned cobbled square surrounded by grand and ornate buildings: the truly monumental Hôtel de Ville and opposite it the only slightly less grand Maison du Roi (which despite its name has never been a royal palace – don’t say you never learned anything from me), all of them linked by narrow, ornately decorated guild houses. The ground floors of these guild houses almost all contain dark, cosy cafés, full of wooden furniture and crackling fires, where you can sit over a coffee or beer and gaze out on this most beguiling of backdrops. Many people seem to spend whole days doing little else.