We headed off. Taking our seats in the different vehicles we drove over to Tollare in a slow, motorized procession, Christian Pietrantoni’s little Vespa leading the way through the silent and burning scrubland, while we boules players followed in Ange’s 4x4 without speaking a word, like astronauts with less than an hour before takeoff. In front of us Christian Pietrantoni swerved his Vespa along the sinuous bends in the road like a motorcycle escort, swaying back and forth with the curves. Behind him, Noriko was clutching the multicolored shirt of her knight errant in one hand and her yellow surfboard in the other, like some profane trophy she was parading from one village to the next in honor of the ocean and its enormous waves (even if the Mediterranean was calm as a lake that day, with just a few little waves perishing humbly against the rocks down below). When we got to Tollare we parked on the large gravel lot and I walked down to the beach to sign us up for the tournament. In a little shack surrounded by reeds where you could buy ice cream and a few soft drinks, a table had been set up under a parasol and two guys in shorts (the organizers) signed the players in before starting the draw. Reaching my hand deep into the pocket of my Bermuda shorts I took out a crumpled old fifty franc note displaying a wizened, grinning Voltaire, and gave our names to the organizers. They just took down our first names, Ange, Jean-Philippe, Jean-Michel (Vilmouth’s first name is not Jean-Michel, by the way, but Jean-Luc, everyone knows that; no matter, later I astutely made up for my slip by telling him I’d invented the pseudonym to help him save face once people had seen him point). When it was finally time for the draw with its unchanging ritual of little scraps of paper mixed together in a cotton sunhat sporting the Pastis 51 emblem, luck had it that my partner was a certain René. Our team was rather unbalanced, I must say, you couldn’t have imagined a more disparate, morganatic pair. René, short and stocky, densely muscled, with a thin black moustache, red shorts, and some old slippers (he could even have gone shirtless), was the infallible shooter, while I, long-limbed and aristocratic (very Prince of Savoie, I’d been told), had the fine long hands of a levelheaded pointer, legs looking rather white compared with my partner’s hairy brown stumps (though, as far as I was concerned, my legs were already ideally tanned), silhouette slightly hunched by the weight of my years and with a hint of lukewarm disdain about it, thanks to the daily exercise of irony. I was wearing a simple baggy pair of beach trunks and a loose white cotton shirt, a light-colored straw hat that fit me like a glove — an elegant yellow straw boater garnished with a fine caramel ribbon that must have belonged to my grandfather Lanskoronskis — and a pair of what are known as boat shoes, the sort worn by indolent rich amateur sailors who idle away their time on yacht-club gangways (you can imagine the sort of figure I cut: people called me Monsieur). After the first game, which of course we won without difficulty, we returned to the shack to announce our rapid victory to the organizers. The other games were still in progress, only one had already ended, apparently without much of a fight, I could see Jean-Luc (disguised as Jean-Michel, three pétanque boules scattered around his feet) leaning on a white plastic chair on the terrace, his pant legs rolled up around his calves, standing there in bare feet gazing out at the sea. And? I asked him. Thirteen to zero, he said, and lazily tossed a pebble into the water that, like him, succumbed, dropping slowly to the bottom, two arm’s lengths from where Noriko was paddling, her surfboard wedged under her arms, slowly advancing over the water, kicking her legs recklessly behind her in the blue, desperately still sea.
Ange and I both made it easily to the semi-finals and I must say that, seeing us fighting out the tournament’s two semi-finals just a few meters apart, each with a different partner (who, although not our regular partners, no doubt gave us better odds), it struck me we were heading straight for a fratricidal confrontation in the finals. Things didn’t turn out that way (and this isn’t the place for me to explain the reasons for Ange’s early defeat). When it came to the finals, crouching down in the circle to point, concentrating, my panama on my head, my shoes covered with a fine coating of gravel dust, I noticed that a small crowd had gathered on the main square of the village, and was looking on attentively. My boule in my hand, now completely immersed, my eyes intense, I sized up the distance separating my boule from the jack and gave myself mental pointers like, “Don’t throw it too short now” (because I tend to be short — in boules that is). Taking one last look at my target, slightly to the left of the natural axis of the slope, and tracing one last time in my mind the entire trajectory of my boule, I finally straightened in the circle, almost in slow motion, and, in the same all-embracing synchronous movement, I lifted my arm and let go of the boule with a final, minutely calculated rotational twist of the wrist. It was short, damn it, I could see it right away. Point another, go on, said René, violently clacking his two boules together to calm his nerves (and perhaps so as not to take his disappointment out on me in a more physical manner). I crouched back down in the circle. From time to time I recognized a few familiar voices in the vague noise of the crowd. Yo qué el hubiera saccado, Noriko was saying. Cres aue va a apuntar otra vez? she added. Callate, lo vas a descentrar, answered Christian Pietrantoni. Not able to concentrate, in fact, I didn’t play right away and got up to have another look at the position of the balls, dropping my boule vertically onto the ground to calculate the resistance of the terrain. Not too short, hmm? said René. No, no, I saw, I saw, I said. I went back to the circle and pointed (I was long, a hair long). At the end of the game, on the last throw, our opponents were leading eleven to nine and the fate of the game hung in the balance. I had the chance to shoot for the win and put all four of our balls closest to the jack. You gotta shoot, said René, you gotta shoot, it’s all or nothing. Though I always concentrate for a long time before pointing, I generally shoot by instinct. I went up to the circle and without a moment’s reflection shot and…knocked their boule from the center. And my boule stayed put. There was a moment of hesitation in the square, murmurs, a buzz of voices, the score was counted. Nine plus four: thirteen. Thirteen, we’d won the competition (the first prize was a Corsican ham, a prizuttu). A vague stir started up around me, people came up on all sides to offer their congratulations, my son jumped up and down for joy, Madeleine ran over to me with our baby Anna in her arms, who uttered her first words on the spot in a burst of enthusiasm (either “papa” or “prizuttu” no one was really sure in the confusion). The organizers then awarded me the first prize of the competition, the Corsican ham. Moved, I took it in both hands and brought it to my lips before holding it up at arm’s length to the crowd while shots were fired and bells rang out all around the village. I then passed the ham to my partner and he kissed it in turn, rubbing it against his moustache, and, in the general hubbub, with Noriko trotting alongside and holding out her surfboard for me to autograph, we did a little victory march around the village square, followed by a limping dog and a couple of kids.
I dedicate these Corsican pages to my wife and children (and thank my teammate).
tokyo
I don’t know the exact name in French, even less what it’s called in Japanese. But what constantly, sometimes painfully, and always tellingly marked the first three weeks of my stay in Japan was the scruchjètta. Not a simple back pain, not really lumbago, not quite sciatica, the scruchjètta (the word is Corsican) is a sort of pain in the kidneys that can strike you at any time, while you’re picking up your boules over a game of pétanque (crack and you’re stuck, knees stiff, a hand on your back, unable to straighten up), or carrying an outboard motor down a slippery boat launch in a little fishing port on the way to your boat. All things considered I owe my scruchjètta to the unhappy concurrence of two causes, one you could call structural, linked to the general weakening of my back since this summer when I carried my daughter down to the beach on my shoulders every day (she’s only two but she already puts it away like a little sumotori), and the second, more conjunctural, being that as I was trying one day at the end of the summer to put back a shut
ter I’d repainted with Madeleine, leaning out the first floor window into the emptiness, I made an abrupt turning movement that twisted my spine.
Now if there’s one country where it’s anything but ideal to have the scruchjètta, it’s Japan. Even if it’s got a surface area of almost one hundred and fifty thousand square miles, that’s not the impression you get when you’re there. To enter any public space, be it a restaurant in Gion or a dark little café in the narrow streets of Shinjuku, a tiny basket or lacquer shop whose smallness is apparent as soon as you walk in the door, you have to bend over on entering and walk with your head down while contorting yourself around the shelves, all the time making sure you don’t bang your head against a kakemono or knock over an entire shelf of precious ceramics, tea pots, or little saké glasses with your backpack while turning around. No sooner had I reached the end of a corridor, the other day, at a restaurant, wearing a vague stoic grimace, than I had to take off my shoes. Now if this operation is relatively easy, ordinarily, and hardly requires the limberness of a grasshopper, things are entirely different when you have a scruchjètta, because every time you bend down toward the ground, no matter how minutely, no matter how gradually, to undo your shoelaces, you’re hit with an often searing pain. But I managed it. After taking off my shoes then and there with the precaution of a diplomat, I entered a silent hall, the wool of my socks swishing softly against the tatami, and then, cautiously, a magnificent traditional dining room with thin movable partitions made of translucent white paper. I crossed the room silently on tiptoes and sat down on one of the cardinal red (or purple or fuchsia, a ceremonial color) zabutons arranged around a low black lacquer table. Sitting immobile in the room like a foreign dignitary, cross-legged, or in the lotus position, or first one then the other, I kept changing my posture as the courses came and went in front of me, kneeling, looking straight ahead, my legs forming first a Y, then an L, a P, an R, an &, and finally, a complete wreck, a poor M with two branches, a pitiful hiragana, a defeated katakana.
As, apart from a few courses in calligraphy, I’d intended to take cooking lessons during this trip to Japan to learn how to cut fish properly, according to the rules of this art, Mr. Sudo of the Shueisha Publishing House, who fulfilled my every wish as soon as I expressed it and sometimes before I even managed to spit it out, took me with him one night to his local sushi restaurant. There, in this little traditional sushi bar with light wood interiors just a stone’s throw from his office, Mr. Sudo was at home. It was his restaurant, his family, his clique, his canteen. He must have filled the owner in on the somewhat unusual though by no means ignominious nature of my desires because no sooner had we entered than I found myself clad in a white apron that was quite difficult to get into (you had to put it on a bit like a parachute, first attaching the lateral straps then passing the whole thing over your head), and brought through a serving door into an extremely cramped kitchen, overcrowded with shelves and cupboards. There, after being guided through the utensils, I was asked to be good enough to wash my hands in a little floor-level washbasin, perfect for washing your feet, and, crouching down on the ground, I rinsed my hands in the running water before my host, who’d been looking on very kindly, showed me how to work the little inverted cylinder holding a syrupy greenish liquid soap. Having soaped my hands I straightened up and, coming over to the sink while giving my hands a quick wipe on my apron, I discovered two identical fish waiting for us on the counter, two small pink and shiny sea bream. I took my place beside the cook and attentively watched him work. He set about carefully scaling the bream with a large hatchet-shaped knife, holding the blade very high, very straight (I would have proceeded a bit differently, but that was perhaps just a question of style, the way two ping-pong players can have entirely different but equally irreproachable ways of holding their rackets). Then he cut off its head with a deliberate oblique thrust, from the top of the head to the bottom of the upper ventral fin. Working away with the knife he then gutted the fish with a series of delicate slashes and scrapes. He rinsed his knife under the tap. Now it’s your turn, he made me understand by threatening me amiably with the knife. I took the bream by the head and laid it smoothly on the cutting board. My knife sank into its flesh and I went about scaling it. As I progressed I could see the owner beside me, watching me work with a sorry sort of look, kindly shaking his head all the while to signify “no,” concerned and sympathetic, “no, not a chance.” When I’d finished I bent under the sink to throw out the viscous fish guts in a large garbage bag and straightened up, with sticky fingers and a slight grimace, one hand on the tender part of my back afflicted with the scruchjètta, and washed my hands under the tap. Several fish came and went in this way in front of us on the workbench, breech, sardines, plaice, flounder, which we gutted and cut into pieces while my host rounded out my cook’s training the whole time with detailed explanations in Japanese. At one moment, adding even more to the confusion, or in an effort to reduce it, the small curtain separating the kitchen from the restaurant opened and Mr. Hasegawa popped his head inside, the editor of a review called Subaru. A minuscule dictionary in his hand, he started translating the cook’s explanations into English, indicating as he went along the French names of the fish we were busy cutting up. This is a mackerel, he said. I’d have said it’s a bonito, I said. A mackerel, a mackerel, he repeated, nodding his head rapidly in confirmation (in Japanese you generally avoid contradicting the person you’re talking with too directly, and never say for example, “no, it is not a bonito,” but — when the context allows, that is—“yes, it’s a mackerel”). A big mackerel, then, I said. A big mackerel, he conceded, sinking his eyes into his little dictionary, which he went back to flipping through feverishly in the doorway. When I’d finally finished preparing my mackerel filets and was somewhat sheepishly arranging the fragmented hunks of flesh on the wooden cutting board with the tip of my knife to make four more or less respectable filets, the cook, standing there beside me in perplexity, leaned over the shapeless mass of hacked mackerel and explained to me with much respect — Mr. Hasegawa was translating — that considering their pitiful condition they were unfit for sashimi, and asked how I’d like them cooked, should they be grilled, fried? Grilled, grilled, I said (raw fish is also good grilled).
kyoto
I didn’t get much chance to improve my German in Kyoto. A few weeks after I arrived I had a visit from my friend Romano Tomasini, a violinist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (of Italian origin, Romano is actually from Luxembourg, but we generally speak French when we’re together). After visiting a few temples Romano proposed we drop in on an acquaintance of his (a German painter married to a Japanese woman, who’d settled in Japan thirty or so years ago) whom he’d met a few years earlier in a lounge at an international airport, their two flights being late, or his only, no matter. Romano had called his friend that morning, who had suggested we pass by his place that afternoon. Equipped with an address written in kanji on a visiting card, we hailed a taxi and got in, showing the visiting card of this Hans-Joachim von R. to the white-gloved driver at the wheel with whom we spoke for a moment (in Japanese, then in English — Romano tried German and Italian but didn’t bother with Luxembourgish) before getting back out: the driver couldn’t quite see what we were getting at. I then suggested that Romano call his friend to ask for more detailed information about his address and, having done so, now armed with an incontestable open sesame (the name of a temple), we caught another taxi whose driver set the meter and started off without a moment’s hesitation.
We drove along for about an hour in Kyoto, then left the metropolitan area and started toward the mountains that surround the city, heading off along the hillside, the meter now indicating over six thousand yen. Finally the taxi stopped in front of what looked like an abandoned carpentry workshop with a large open shed alongside a pathway. Long narrow strips of rough wood prickly with shavings were fixed to workbenches inside, and a carpet of sawdust as fine as autumn moss covered the ground. The d
river turned around to say something that, despite my modest trilingualism and Romano’s diverse linguistic talents, we couldn’t understand. Romano nodded his head affirmatively and once more showed him Hans-Joachim von R.’s finely embossed visiting card over the seat. The driver examined the visiting card attentively and finally got out of the taxi. He wandered along the street for a few moments before asking a woman for directions, after which he got back into the car with a skeptical look, did a U-turn and drove slowly along the side of the road for a few minutes more before pulling up onto the sidewalk and turning off the motor. There, the visiting card in his hand, he picked up the car telephone and dialed Hans-Joachim von R.’s number. It rang once, twice, then connected, and we heard Hans-Joachim von R.’s distant voice saying in German something like: “We’re not in right now, but you can leave a message after the beep.” Beeep.
Self-Portrait Abroad Page 2