My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

One by one, all of soukous’s biggest stars made their débuts in Paris: Tabu Ley Rochereau, in 1970; Joseph Kabasele, also in 1970; Franco and O.K. Jazz, in 1978. In Paris you could sing about anything you wanted, you could record in the best studios, you could play to the ever growing population of Africans and West Indians. It was safe; there was money. Nightclubs catering to the African community were opening—Keur Samba, a swanky place near the Place de la Concorde, was the first, in 1975, followed by the Black and White Club, the Atlantis, Timmy’s, L’Alizé, Au Petit Tam-Tam. By the late seventies, more and more of Zaire’s most prominent musicians were leaving Africa to tour Europe and weren’t coming back. In 1980 came the most symbolic move of all: While touring with O.K. Jazz, Franco bought a house in Brussels and an apartment in Paris and started spending more time far from home.

  DAVID HALFON’S BACK CORNER of the instrument shop in Saint-Michel quickly became one of the most famous back corners in Paris. Most Africans in Paris lived in other neighborhoods—in the north, in Barbès and Saint-Denis, or to the east, in the “red” suburb of Montreuil, which is said to have the largest community of Malians outside Mali and as a municipality has financed public works projects in Mali’s villages. But the goods to be found in Saint-Michel were worth traveling for—it was the sound of the familiar, of the life that had been left behind. Before long, David had rented a storefront and set up a proper store.

  Hervé worked in Afric’ Music after school. He was then a teenager, mildly disgusted by French pop treacle like Plastic Bertrand and only occasionally moved by French crooners like Charles Aznavour. His musical interests were black soul, black reggae, black blues. Hanging around David, he became fluent in the music of Congo, Senegal, Nigeria, and Antilles. Fourteen years ago, David decided to sell Afric’ Music and open a chain of fast-food restaurants, so Hervé and a partner bought him out. They also began producing a number of African bands, including the renowned Congolese guitarist Diblo Dibala and his band, Matchatcha; Les Coeurs Brisés; Branché; and Flaisha Mani, known as the Diamond of Zaire.

  Hervé is now thirty-six years old, with a sinewy build, receding dark hair, and the chic, messy look of a tragic intellectual. It has never struck him as weird or incongruous that he is a white guy, and a Jewish one at that, selling African music to expatriates. His parents both grew up in Tunisia and imparted something of an outsider’s perspective to him; as a result, Hervé’s outlook on the archetypal French persona is somewhat negative. One recent morning, as he was shelving new CDs, he said, “I don’t like the narrow-mindedness of French people. I’m more comfortable with Africans. They have a different attitude—more open to the world.” He is tempted to leave France altogether. Five years ago, a customer of his who had moved back to Ivory Coast asked him to come to Abidjan and help him open a record store. Hervé and his wife visited for two weeks. They were put up in the best hotel in the country and had a car and driver at their disposal, but, ultimately, they decided that they felt too out of place. Hervé now says he is considering moving to Canada or Israel but isn’t sure how or when he will ever really leave.

  Hervé’s role in the store is all-inclusive. He orders new music, arranges it on the shelves, writes the Afric’ Music bestseller lists—African and Caribbean—that hang on the back wall, answers the phone, writes up sales, and takes out the trash. He also dispenses opinions and directives to anyone willing to hear them. He has a generous policy regarding test drives: He is willing to open any CD to let you have a listen; as a result, about half the CDs in the store no longer have their plastic wrappers. Hervé likes to steer customers toward what he calls “hot music.” By hot he means sexy, intense, and exciting rather than trendy. Only a small amount of dancing occurs in the store, though; the customers, who are overwhelmingly male, usually just lean up against the counter and move only one part of their body—a foot, a hand, a chin—in time with the song. Hervé is less inhibited and often pounds out the beat on his thighs or on the counter, sometimes using the plastic cover of a CD. When he’s not at the store, he plays drums as a hobby, but the fact that he lives in an apartment with his wife and their two small kids cuts into his rehearsal opportunities.

  Hervé is a cheerful person, although he says that being in the record store business is a living nightmare. For one thing, Afric’Music no longer enjoys the primacy it had when it opened in 1976. African music has become a real commodity in Paris: A number of competing specialty shops have cropped up in the past two decades, and FNAC, the large French music-and-bookstore chain, now features an African section. The specialty record store mortality rate is high—Blue Moon Musique, Anvers Musique, and Kim Music, among others, have gone out of business—but new ones open all the time. In the past year or so, five or six tiny stores have opened in Saint-Denis.

  One morning in early September, I headed over to Afric’ Music. There was a pinch in the air, a scrim over the sun, and smoke gray clouds scudding across the horizon. Placards advertising Ray Charles’s upcoming concert were pasted on every light pole and bus shelter in Paris. When I arrived at Afric’ Music, Hervé was chatting with two young men from Benin, who were taken with an album called Hot Zouk Love. Hervé knows almost all his customers by sight and most by name; some are even second-generation shoppers. One of the young men from Benin was the son of a longtime customer. After a moment, a short, bubbly guy carrying two cellphones and a set of car keys came in, gave Hervé a hug, and started scanning the CD section marked “Nigeria.” We started to talk, and I asked him what he did for a living.

  “I was a student in economics,” he said, “but now I drive a taxi, madame.” He chuckled and added that he was from Nigeria but was looking for a record by a Haitian band called Digital Express. “These days, you have to go to London to find really good Nigerian music,” he said. He winked at me and then said in a loud voice, “Hervé, he doesn’t like Nigerians.”

  Hervé broke off his conversation with the men from Benin and started hollering in agitated French. He grabbed an album by King Sunny Ade, who is from Nigeria, and poked the taxi driver with it. “And what about Tilda?” Hervé said. “I have Tilda albums, too.”

  “She’s not Nigerian!” the man said.

  “Yes, she is,” Hervé said.

  “No! She isn’t!” the man said excitedly. “Her father is Nigerian, but her mother is from Cameroon!”

  “Well, she’s Nigerian, then,” Hervé said, pleased with himself.

  “No,” the cabdriver said. “Half of her is not Nigerian. She sings Nigerian songs, but she’s only half.”

  The men from Benin paid for their copy of Hot Zouk Love and quietly edged out of the store.

  A young lawyer from Cameroon came in. He shook hands with Hervé and explained that he was going to DJ at a party that night—the wedding of a French friend and an African friend—so he wanted the best dance music he could find. Hervé put on a singer named Sandra Melody doing a reggae version of the American group T.L.C.’s song “No Scrubs.” I mentioned to the lawyer that it was an American song, and he gasped.

  “No way is this an American song!” he exclaimed. “Listen!” He rested his right hand on his right hip, held up his left hand as if he were holding a partner, and then started to shimmy back and forth. Everyone in the store paused as he completed his turn around the floor. When the song ended, he turned to me and said, “See? You couldn’t dance to it like this if it were an American song!”

  THERE WAS A MOMENT when it seemed as if Congo would once again be the home of the Congo sound. In 1997, Laurent Kabila, the leader of the People’s Revolutionary Party, marched with his troops into Kinshasa, and the aging Mobutu, who was suffering from terminal cancer, fled the country. Kabila’s takeover was celebrated everywhere, including in Paris, where Tabu Ley Rochereau, one of the last members of the generation that had invented soukous, was quoted as saying that it was time for the diaspora to end, for Congo’s musicians to go home. Kabila offered him a deputy post in his transitional parliament, and Tabu Ley accepted. A few ot
hers followed, most notably Sam Mangwana and the singer Kanda Bongo Man, but soon they returned to Europe: Even with Mobutu gone, the country’s political and economic turmoil continued. (Kabila was assassinated in 2001; his son, Joseph, is now in power.) And, for their part, the musicians who had lived in Europe had grown used to being able to sing about whatever they wanted, used to forty-eight-track studios and the most advanced synthesizers and drum machines and to an audience that had spread from the rue des Plantes all over the world.

  While I was in Paris, I visited the guitarist Diblo Dibala, who had moved to Europe in 1989. He said that he was a supporter of both Kabilas but that he still couldn’t imagine going back.”When you’ve been away for fifteen or twenty years, the reality of the place is different from what you remember,” he said. “We’re much more popular here than in Congo. The people there forget you when you leave for so long.” He hasn’t performed in Kinshasa since 1995. He said that he finds his inspiration in Paris, because it is where most African musicians are, and he doesn’t think that will change. “Everyone comes to Paris,” he said.

  Soukous has become, then, the music of Africa once removed; it has absorbed yet another new culture, and when you listen to what is being recorded now, you hear a briskness and shimmer, as if the clamor and sleekness of modern Paris were a constant underscore. You might miss the pensive majesty of Franco’s orchestra, but it is the nature of Congolese music to reach out, react, and remake itself each time it encounters a different world. One afternoon, Dany Engobo, the leader of Les Coeurs Brisés, stopped by my hotel to bring me the group’s latest CD. I was staying in a smart new place in Montparnasse that I had chosen because of its proximity to the record store but that also happened to be decorated in Africa chic; it had animal-print wallpaper and ethnic knickknacks, and African music—mostly Senegalese and Nigerian—was piped into the lobby all day long, re-creating in this bourgeois arrondissement of Paris a mythic version of pre–French colonial Africa. Engobo has lived in Paris since 1976 and started Les Coeurs Brisés after he arrived. The group—which includes musicians from Algeria, France, and Israel—has played throughout the United States and Europe and in a few African countries, but never in Kinshasa or Brazzaville, where Engobo is from. He doesn’t expect that they will play there anytime soon. “It’s too dangerous to go,” Engobo said, shrugging. “I’d like to go sometime, but . . .”

  He paused, and the music whirled around us, a King Sunny Ade melody with tinkling thumb piano and the singer’s reedy alto spelling out the tune.”I am a citizen of the world,” Engobo said. “I don’t think I’ll ever go back. But in life, you never know.”

  AT AFRIC’ MUSIC, while the Cameroonian lawyer was dancing, a tall man with a hospital employee ID around his neck walked in. “Hervé,” he said, “I’m dying for the new Gilberto Santa Rosa. Do you have it?” Hervé pulled several Santa Rosa CDs out of a stack. The man shuffled through them and said he wasn’t sure if any of these was the one he wanted. He pulled his cellphone out of a holster, called one of Hervé’s competitors, who was unhelpful, and then briefly contemplated calling friends in Martinique for a consultation.

  While he was thinking, a heavyset blind man from Guadeloupe eased his way through the doorway, folded up his cane, leaned on the counter, and asked Hervé to put on something by the popular young band Zouk Station. Hervé found the album, split the shrink-wrap with a two-euro coin, and put it on. The blind man smiled and said he would buy it. Two elderly women walking past with groceries, their baguettes sticking up like exclamation points, glanced in anxiously as they moved through the blast of Zouk Station. A red-cheeked drunk zigzagged across the rue des Plantes toward the music, rolled through the door, and came to rest against the counter. Just then, the man who was thinking about calling Martinique realized that it was four in the morning in the Caribbean, so he told Hervé he would take two Santa Rosa albums. As he was paying, a cab pulled onto the sidewalk in front of Afric’ Music, and a compact old man from Togo wearing a newsboy cap and a bomber jacket got out of the driver’s seat, walked into the store, headed for the rack marked “Congo,” ran his hands up and down the CDs, and said, “Franco! Oh, oh, Franco!” After a moment, he walked back out of the store, got into his cab, and drove away.

  “He likes Franco,” Hervé said.

  The Cameroonian lawyer had chosen five albums and wanted more. Hervé removed the previous selection and blasted Fara Fara. The lawyer did a two-step, a tango move, and then shook his head. Off with Fara Fara. On with the new CD by Wenge Musica. The song had a galloping bass line and a bright, chattering guitar, and soon the lawyer was doing a modified cha-cha and Hervé was smiling, beating a tattoo on the counter. The sound was huge, pushing out of the little store and ballooning onto the Paris sidewalk, where the businesspeople and the shop clerks of Montparnasse were striding by in the dull autumn sunlight, smoking and talking on their way to lunch. As the song reached its crescendo, a man from Ivory Coast stepped into the store, slapped Hervé on the back, pulled out his cellphone, called a friend, and, when his friend answered, said simply, “Hey. I’m here.”

  Like Waters and

  Chocolate Pancakes

  The lame and the halt come to Héviz. The arthritic, the rheumatoid, and the spinally challenged come, too, and those with gout, with sore gums, and with the nonspecific but acute craving to be young. They come to the little round lake in the middle of Hungary and strap on inflatable water wings or squeeze an inner tube under their arms and then float for hours, as motionless as lily pads, waiting for Héviz to work. The water in the lake is warm and glassy blue. It comes from a spring deep in the earth and supposedly contains minerals and radioactivity with healing powers. Nothing happens when you touch it, except that you start to smell a little like an egg-salad sandwich.

  When my mother and I went to Héviz recently, I told her that I wasn’t sure I believed the thermal waters there could do anything, and a man overhearing me poked my mother in the ribs and said, “Wait and see, madam! You’ll look younger than your daughter when you get out!” This got me thinking. If my mother was going to end up looking younger than me, I wondered what I would end up looking like. What if my mother went in and I didn’t, and then we ended up looking the same age, like those indistinguishable mothers and daughters in the old Breck commercials? Nobody at the lake looked young or perky, but maybe they were, like, two hundred years old, in which case they looked great!

  But that made me think of something else: Exactly how many years would the lake take off your age? I wanted to know this because I’m not that old, and I didn’t want the Héviz waters to send me back to my teenage years, because they weren’t that enjoyable. Unfortunately, no one at the lake could tell me how long to stay in the lake in order to rejuvenate myself to a specific age that I liked a lot. It’s probably more like cooking a turkey, where you have guidelines, but in the end you have to rely on instinct and touch and what time you need to get dinner on the table. I also think you aren’t supposed to come here worrying about such things. You come to Héviz to bob around in the hot pond and luxuriate in knowing that whatever ails you will be cured.

  If you are Hungarian and have a note from your doctor, you can come to Héviz and stay in the square brick hostels in the park that surrounds the lake. Everybody else stays in hotels and guesthouses on the hills that rise up beyond the park. The visitors appear to be approximately one hundred percent German or Austrian, with the occasional Swiss. The parking lot of our hotel, the Danubius Thermal Hotel Aqua, was filled with late-model white Mercedeses lined up in a long, shiny row like a mouthful of molars. The new houses nearby are painted cocoa brown and have projecting eaves and window boxes and pierced woodwork along their balconies, in the style of an alpine chalet. In Héviz, there are German sausage stands and prices posted in German denominations. There are even a few teenage German greasers with pierced ears and round-toed leather boots and Metallica T-shirts. Perhaps they were actually middle-aged businessmen from Frankfurt who had spent a
lot of time in the lake. The number of Germans here caught me by surprise, although I’d heard that families scattered in East and West Germany used to reunite during vacations in this part of Hungary, because it was almost neutral ground.

  The Thermal Hotel Aqua is on one of those hills above the lake; it is a newish building with clean lines that could house an insurance company in a Midwest office park. The big indoor pool is filled with water pumped out of the lake. Everyone walks around in fluffy white robes and rubber thongs. People at the Thermal Hotel Aqua look a little glossy all the time, which might be from soaking in the radioactive water or from starting their days at the breakfast buffet, which includes two kinds of hot dogs and chocolate cake. Health, of course, is a relative thing.

  “What is your problem?” the doctor asked me when I went in for my required initial consultation. I said I had come just to relax at the spa and see if there was something special about the Héviz water. “I understand,” he said, tapping his mustache with the end of his pencil. “I’ll put down ‘recreation’ for your diagnosis.”

  He wrote for a moment on a little chart on his desk and then handed it to me. On the front was a list of the baths he recommended—two twenty-minute sessions each day in the thermal pool, one electric compartment bath, one underwater massage. On the back of the chart there were printed outlines of bodies; he had scribbled wiggly lines on them to indicate where he wanted me massaged and mud packed. I liked the sound of the carbonic acid bath and the infrared treatment, but he shook his head and said those were for people with joint and bone problems. We then talked for a moment about the Gundel’s nut-and-chocolate-filled pancakes I’d had at dinner the night before.

  I realized then that the Héviz canon is that you come and get cured of your aches and pains and then get younger and younger; once you plateau at whatever age you’re going to regress to, you go and eat a lot of hot dogs and chocolate cake and loll around. Exercise here is something you sign up and pay for; it’s called “gymnastic,” it’s listed as a therapy on the hotel price list, and unless the doctor prescribed it for you, you don’t have to do it.