The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  Early on in his own thoroughly mesmerizing book, Aragon wonders if reality is but “a delirium of interpretation,” and in the subsequent chapters he sets out on more or less a mission of exploring the Grands Boulevards that also attract Breton; he does so with a concentration on his favorite of the old passages (ancient shopping arcades) in the area, the Passage de l’Opéra, which, with its roof of cast iron and milky glass filtering the midafternoon sunlight, exists in an almost subaqueous glow for him, suitably oneiric. He approaches the whole project as if wandering through some foreign land, taking in everything with heightened perception at last, and in his repeated visits he responds to various enterprises housed within the mazelike and usually empty Passage de l’Opéra (a shop for ornate walking canes, another for trusses, a rundown café, even a “massage parlor” that appears to be only a ruse for outright hookerdom) with an awareness that declares transcendence is near, that he might eventually find himself at an exact place where it seems he was meant to be all along, perhaps has been all along, and valid insight almost beyond life—or better yet, an enhancement of life—is about to transpire; the impact of it all can render anything taken for granted in life suddenly in the category of the definitely mythic. Here’s a borrowing from the original translation of Le Paysan de Paris by Simon Watson Taylor that the brave little publisher Exact Change used for its 2004 reprinting; Aragon’s prose is appropriately lyrical as he senses a primal, even Edenic quality to it all:

  It is you, metaphysical entity of places, who lull children to sleep, it is you who people their dreams. These shores of the unknown, sands shivering with anguish and anticipation, are fringed by the substance of our minds . . . [It was] this sensation of strangeness which filled me when I was still a creature of pure wonder, in a setting where I first became aware of the presence of a coherence for which I could not account but which sent its roots deep into my heart.

  Lovely stuff, no?

  And it echoes Borges’s feeling in Barracas. And in a way, both writers with their own aimless walking are travelers, too, granting that it is foot travel they speak of and in their own cities. And aren’t we all travelers in our dreams, wandering alone and solitary, constantly being drawn to a place where we should be, for the larger perception we should have, a voice often urging us on, as described? In my case the voice was nearly a distinct whispering heard as my own 25-buck, black-and-white nylon Reeboks shuffled over the sidewalks of Paris in the warm evenings of summer 2011, where despite all that sadness and also, and often, too much time on my hands in Paris to think about everything I had messed up in my life over the years, I did what I did.

  I inevitably ended up there again.

  It would happen on any one of those evenings. And just to look up between the rows of mansard-roofed buildings, as Rue Saint-Martin became Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, was to see at the far-off top of the slope the imposing Gare de l’Est—very white and showing new red awnings for its many repeated rectangular windows flanking a massive fan-shaped window, airily delicate and almost as high as the building itself—which meant I knew again where I was going to, had my cue, so to speak. And I started up that slight hill of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin leading me to the place, heading that way.

  Early evening in Paris.

  Yes, early evening in Paris, and it’s balmy summer, the daylight still remaining but softened.

  A wide cobbled plaza with taxi stands spreads in front of the station. Right beside it is a narrow street, Rue d’Alsace, which offers still more taxi stands; there’s a long line of double doors to the station here, always open in summer, so you can look within to see all those people, shadowy and with the many destinations they have, moving across the polished terrazzo floor, almost like a glassy lake they’re magically walking on this way and that, the news kiosks and coffee counters busy. A dim street, Rue d’Alsace is an odd one, too, in that it abruptly dead-ends—or in this case is interrupted—at a stairway with a double set of steep white stone steps that must date back to the mid-19th century, when the station was built. The steps, with sculpted banister rails, ascend curvingly on each side of a very odd little platform enclave about halfway up of weeds and litter and an arched, rusty iron door; that door looks more like an entryway to a burial vault than anything else, even if it actually leads to maybe some kind of functional utilities tunnel. The individual slabs of the steps are as worn as old bars of soap, and in the steep climb you begin to feel it in your calves, agreeably so, while the stairway continues to take you higher, finally to another level altogether, quite far above the station.

  At the top, a true other world altogether suddenly opens up, because as the narrow Rue d’Alsace resumes again now on this higher level, you’re not only well above Paris, it seems, but in a wide-open space removed enough from everything else in the clutter of the city that it can feel as if you aren’t even in the city of Paris below.

  There are ramshackle shops and cafés along one side of Rue d’Alsace, and on the other open side, across the street’s sticky summer asphalt, is a low stone wall, graffiti-splattered, that looks out over the sizable expanse of the railway yards below, leading into the rear of the station. Now deserted, the long platforms go on for probably a quarter mile, and the rails atop the rusted roadbed are as shiny as liquid mercury, the crisscrossing overhead wires for the electrified trains a complicated, uneven dark mesh; announcements from the station play on the speakers, soft and warbly at this distance, and the chime music repeating its little truncated song of a few notes—the trademark jingle in all Paris train stations to signal announcements—is even softer and more warbly, nice. Or it’s all so nice, in fact, that it could be rare, in that this is one of the infrequent places in the city where, without the clutter of trees or buildings, you are in a space open enough that the sky itself seems to dominate. And to make it better in Paris in July and August, that huge sky at the end of a summer day can go all unheard-of shades of rich color, orange and purple and even full-fledged scarlet, sometimes big gilded clouds thrown into the panorama to render everything more striking still. Men in grimy clothes congregate in packs along the wall in the evening and drink tall cans of beer, talking low, laughing low, Indian or African and delivered at last, surely, from labor at the end of a long day. Across from the wall, back on the other side of the street, the very first shop in the row of marginal enterprises—those shabby cafés, a couple of cramped Internet and overseas-phoning nooks, a tiny old hotel with nothing more for identification than the standard blue-on-white plastic HOTEL sign glowing—is a bookshop called Librairie la Balustrade, which is wonderful and strangely intriguing in itself. Its façade is painted a bright cream color, hopeful among the surrounding sooty buildings, with a small hand-scrawled card hung behind the glass on the front door giving the limited hours each week the shop is open; the books displayed in the windows are usually left-wing fare (ecology manifestoes, political manifestoes) or philosophical fare (anything from Kant clear through to Derrida) or mysteriously spiritual fare (meditation texts, narratives on the visionary), entirely intriguing. The bookshop seems suitable indeed for the mood of this particular enclave of Paris, to the point that you can’t help but jot down in a pocket notebook every time you go there the titles of some of the latest arrivals displayed; such titles make for nearly little prayers in themselves and are often metaphysical in intent, no doubt, sometimes directly so, to cause you to linger on the sidewalk and, well, ponder:

  La Vie des Océans, de Leur Naissance à Leur Disparition

  par Yves Lancelot

  and

  Quand les Sciences Dialoguent avec la Métaphysique

  par Pascal Charbonnat

  Oh, the lives of oceans, their births and their deaths! And—oh, again—when the sciences do have their dreamy and extendedly spirited dialogues with the metaphysical!

  The evening smells somehow sweetly of the summer warmth cut by a tinge of thick, lingering exhaust, despite what the Parisian authorities claim to be their cleaning up of the city
’s air—a good smell, nevertheless, because it is the smell of Paris and always pleasant.

  And where it all gets strangest, and best, is at that small café, the one I previously spoke of, a block beyond the bookshop and at the corner of Rue d’Alsace and Rue des Deux Gares. Rue des Deux Gares is a nondescript little connecting street thick with more of the blue-on-white lit plastic signs saying HOTEL, and it leads at an angle to the nearby Gare du Nord, the other of the two railroad stations the street’s name pays tribute to. In its own appellation, the café is also perfectly suitable, because dull gold letters on the tattered red awning out front do announce it as “Au Train de Vie,” meaning in this case not just the idiomatic French term for “lifestyle” but nothing less than—with a crisp pun when taken literally—“the train of life,” all right. In some long-gone hope of rendering it right for the location, probably back in the ’60s or ’70s from the looks of it, somebody apparently decided to give this everyday working-class café/brasserie a thoroughly railroad motif. The doors at the corner remain open to the sidewalk, and with yellowing lace half curtains hung from tarnished brass rods in the row of street-side windows, you’re able to look above them and inside, past a grimy flower-print tile floor, to see how the bar, short, is studded with the cluster of actual headlamps from a long-forgotten streamlined train, all clear- or red-glass concentric lenses and polished chrome; on a high shelf on the far wall, above framed black-and-white photos of once-modern diesel locomotives and wagons-lits, is an extensive collection of moth-eaten conductor’s caps, side by side. The finishing, and maybe most appreciated, touch of all is how the few tables for the dining area along the windows on the Rue des Deux Gares side use those salvaged Pullman-car seats, the artifacts also previously mentioned and lumpily upholstered in mustard-yellow faux leather trimmed with blue piping, the armrests the same dark blue. And to make everything even more right, on the narrow cracked sidewalk out front, instead of having the standard variety of café terrasse setup, small chairs and tables, they have arranged there—facing the low stone wall across the street and overlooking the open railway yards and with the huge, huge Paris sky beyond often igniting in such very unreal colors—more of the coach seats and wobbly low wooden tables set between them. Which means that in the early evening after so much walking, you can end up there, you can ease into one of the old oversize seats with the springs poking out here and there, you can sit down and order from the leathery-faced waiter—who doesn’t wear any waiter’s outfit and could be just another working-class guy doing this after a day on another job—a single strong black café express for a euro and a half, as brought to you in a white demitasse rattling on a white saucer, the waiter taking a little time to rearrange the couple of sugar cubes on the side of the saucer along with the single spoon after he sets the coffee down for you, “Monsieur,” and you can sit there, for me that place where I had to be—almost comically named the “train of life,” but, as emphasized, so appropriate for it, too—and take in the scene, enjoy the ride, if you will.

  Or to put it another way, you do get on board again for a soothing and even transcendent silent excursion into the evening, as everything else seems to vanish—because remember Borges and Aragon and what happened to them when they found themselves in places where they needed to be, where a voice perhaps told them to go, also think of the general mind-set of another city wanderer, the poet Pessoa, a validly mysterious quotation from whom I attached to my writing here right at the start as an epigraph, which suggests the mood of this state as well—and in that seat, sipping the coffee, not even realizing how long it is you stay there, the many sadnesses you might have with you in the world seem to ease up, fall into proper perspective—like that of my friend paralyzed and perpetually watching CNN Europe in L’Hôpital Fernand-Widal, or that regarding my nephew, whom I didn’t know well enough, and due to some drifting apart in our family, I had, rather stupidly, let time pass without getting to know him better, a sweet kid, so special that he actually worried if he had done the right thing in picking up a worthless souvenir trinket when the ragged boys peddling them fled the cops—and there you are above it all, flying along, traveling under the wide sky on a Pullman-car seat outdoors in the balmy evening of the 10th Arrondissement and at a café called—please don’t laugh when I repeat it again—Au Train de Vie—entering into a calming state of mind deeper and more meaningful than life but still completely amazed at the whole very wonderful journey of it, life, too.

  And that is where I would go, where I had to be on those many summer evenings. And there I seemed to encounter my own moment of timelessness, and there I wasn’t fully sure where I was, but I realized I was somewhere that made me more sure of where I was than any other place I knew (something like this had happened to me other times in traveling, my returning, repeatedly and half somnambulistically, to a small whitewashed stone church on a high cliff beside the sparkling aqua ocean during a stay in Rio de Janeiro, also my returning again and again to get pleasantly lost in the maze of the old jewelry-market district of Hyderabad in India, with sacred cows grazing in the littered streets and the welcome full explosion of smells and color and noise that is any marketplace in India), and if maybe all of one’s time on this planet does seem little more than an insubstantial dream, this experience offered transport into something larger, going beyond the dream and clear into what could be a dream about the dream itself, free of the ties of reality at last and laced with calm and understanding beyond understanding—truer than true.

  On my last evening in Paris, before I was to fly out the next day, I had everything packed up back at the apartment and the place painstakingly cleaned, which I hoped the owner, my friend the Saul Bellow scholar’s elderly Oncle Robert, would approve of if he ever showed up from Cannes. That done, I went to Rue d’Alsace again, or more exactly, ended up there yet again.

  I knew had accomplished what I had to accomplish on the manuscript. I’d worked especially hard on it the past week or so, my overall performance ultimately not disappointing, I hoped, the taxpayers of the state of Texas, the people who funded my university and therefore my grant. I now sat outside at Au Train de Vie for close to an hour. I’m not sure that the sense of being beyond everything, almost in another, more significant realm entirely, quite set in on this final evening as I plunked a sugar cube into the coffee, stirred the rich black essence with the stubby spoon. And the sadness I experienced now was not in thinking about those troubling matters I had to face in Paris that summer, the large issues, because in truth most of that I had come to terms with the best I could; I did reach understanding. (My nephew, back in Rhode Island, wrote me excited e-mails about how great the trip had been for him, even said that he was tossing the original idea for the screenplay he’d been working on for his course and now was starting a completely different screenplay, less contrived, about a guy his age who plays prep school hockey, not very well, going to Paris to visit his screwy uncle and embarking on concocted adventures with some even screwier Australian kids; he wanted my input on the new scenario he had come up with, saying that the most valuable thing anybody had ever told him about writing was exactly what I had said to him, emphasizing that he should write about what he knew; his thanking me in the e-mails made me feel good. The sister and brother-in-law of my friend in the hospital finally had everything approved and in order, so that he could, in fact, be moved from Paris to Nantes, where they lived, and visiting him for a final time at Fernand-Widal a couple of days before, with the bed sheets and the hospital gown he was wearing now both a pale yellow, despite the room being off the quiet, empty corridor of Secteur Bleu, I entered to see him smiling in the sunshine pouring through that window he sat beside; he appeared nothing short of radiant amid so much yellow, telling me in his difficult speech, smiling more, how he looked forward to soon being near his relatives, who, as it currently stood, got to take the train to visit him here in Paris only once a month; I think I was taken by his optimism in the course of such personal disaster, our part
ing handshake eventually exchanged with both of us knowing we most likely would never see each other again, but still, there would always be for me this show of his sheer winning outlook, or unmitigated bravery—and that, too, made me feel good.) No, the current sadness now was more mildly mundane, and it existed, predictably enough, in my realizing that I would miss this spot I had often come to. I’d really miss being in Paris as well, where I had spent much of my life over the last 25 years and where I had many close friends to talk with about literature—good, enlightening conversation and definitely much more of that sort of thing than I had with so-called academic colleagues at my supposed home in Texas (where, if truth be known, I simply had moved for a job years before, and to me Texas never felt anywhere near being what one might call home). I had the pocket notebook with a red marbleized cover and a Bic pen laid out on the wobbly table. In between sips and looking up to that huge sky again—travelers with roller luggage walking by now and then, heading to or coming from the Gare de l’Est—I jotted some notes about the details of the scene there on Rue d’Alsace, probably knowing already that I would be writing an essay like the one you’re reading now (several days ago I was told in an e-mail that the café, thoroughly funky and authentic when I had been there, has undergone some rather clinical, and most unfortunate, extensive remodeling), and I guess that I was just feeling a little lost suddenly and also pretty tired, physically so.