by James Prosek
That was not the case this evening, though, because shortly thereafter one of the rods bent with a fish. The people sitting on their blankets couldn’t believe the crazy pêcheur had actually hooked one.
“He’s hooked the bottom,” said the German to his lady. Moments later, François hauled a two-foot eel flipping up the inclined wall and onto the lap of another young lady, who was also German, a beautiful blond wearing a white dress. She spilled her glass of white wine and gave the pêcheur a nasty look with icy blue eyes. But François passed the cries of Scheisse to the big overhanging willow, which passed them to the breeze that blew from the sea at Le Havre.
A sedentary poet with an open book of Baudelaire, stationary as a bow ornament on a ship at the very tip of the island, uncrossed his legs and stood up wide-eyed as if he’d never seen a living creature pulled from the water.
“Incroyable,” the poet cried out, “incroyable!”
I had been flipping through the sticky Financial Times and admiring the way the descending sun played rose on the pink paper, but had to give up the “companies and markets” because the pêcheur demanded it. He took it with his big hands and laid it on the eel, and as the eel slipped through, it covered the stock-market tables in a thick white slime. He grabbed the eel’s head and it wound its tail around the sleeve of his flannel coat—already encrusted with the dry crystallized mucus of a thousand eels.
The drummers looked on but continued their play confidently, as if they’d conjured the snake-fish from the Seine. François slid the eel into the wicker creel and drew the brass latch sound. He admitted to me as he rebaited his line and settled in his seat that he too had been surprised when, fifteen years before, he pulled his first eel from the Seine.
François then took a bottle of red wine from his canvas satchel and handed it to me to pull the cork. He bottled it himself and the label was his own design, a simple abstract sketch in ink. “Moins cher,” he said.
The sun was just below the metal grid of Pont des Arts and silhouetted the people viewing the display there of massive papier-mâché, burlap, and fiberglass sculptures of men and horses that a Senegalese man had created to represent the battle of the Little Bighorn.
General Custer stood tall with gun in hand, careful not to fall into the Seine. He took his last stand west of us, between felled horses tossing their massive hooves and tails.
Now the passing boats with their shining lights reflected in Pierre’s glasses and shone red through the numerous wine bottles surrounded by their circles of drinkers. Some people had brought candles that they lit and stuck in the mouths of empty bottles or adhered with hot wax to the cobbles. François showed a nervous alertness and put down his glass. “J’ai une touche,” he said, for he did have a bite. Another eel came winding serpentine up the wall and into François’s creel. He lit his pipe with a fish-shaped lighter he had carved that hung by a string from his neck. Bells rang from Notre-Dame cathedral. The Louvre was red just before the sun went down.
François shared his fifth-floor apartment at 41, rue de Seine with his wife, his daughters Euridice and Penelope, and his obsession with fish. The fishing gear was stowed and the creel full of eels set down.
On the way back from the river, Pierre had gone to his own apartment on rue Dauphine to get a loaf of bread and a bottle of champagne. By the time he returned I had glimpsed the crowded room where François introduced guests to the workings of his mind.
François made things from found objects, he sculpted, he sawed, he welded, he painted. His studio was an attic space up a small stair, too small for a grown man to stand in. In the living room there were skin mounts and dried pieces of fish he had caught in various parts of the world—a dorado from the Caribbean, a taimen from Mongolia—and on the brick-and-stone floor were plaster casts of the largest fish he had caught in the Seine, a five-kilo bream, a seven-kilo zander. There were large nightmarish fishing flies he had welded from metal fragments—the tines of a pitchfork for legs, an oil-can abdomen, the spool of a fishing reel for a head. In the middle of the room was a dark wooden table in the shape of a fish, which François had carved from slabs of apple wood attached with metal strips and screws.
On a shelf along the inside wall were clay and lead sculptures he had made, many of them representing his friends. Among them was a bronze of Pierre in the nude holding a big salmon by the tail, his body arched back, midsection thrust forward, a fishing rod for a penis. Hanging on the wall was the pêcheur’s self-portrait with a salmon from the Moy River in Ireland. Fish descended from the ceilings and swam up from the floors, leaped in stained glass from the windows.
“François is remarkable. What a fantastic place,” cried Pierre, coming in through the door, his hand on the neck of the champagne bottle, the baguette wrapped in a paper bag under his arm.
The pêcheur had sautéed eel in olive oil and laid out some blood sausage grilled with potatoes. We ate off wooden plates on the table shaped like a fish and drank alternately champagne and cahors.
“I love potatoes,” said François.
Some time in the early morning I stumbled back to Pierre’s office to sleep and Pierre walked back to his home. Only moments later, it seemed, Pierre rang the office telephone to wake me. I had a headache and my tongue felt like a piece of salted cod.
Rue Dauphine was quiet and damp from rain. I walked over Pont Neuf down the stairs to the place du Vert Galant and to the tip of the island, where the pêcheur already had his lines in the water and stood puffing his pipe under the overhanging willow tree. “’Jour,” François said, his breath visible in the cool morning. Pierre came to the tip of the island shortly after, his hands in his pockets, a hat on his head. I wondered if he had gone to sleep at all.
All the colorful boats were moored, collecting dew. When the sun started to creep up over Notre-Dame, men appeared to sop up the dew with rags and dry the seats for passengers. François had a golden bell on the tip of one of his rods and the morning light sparkled on it as it did on the gold of the dome of the Institut de France, shining against the sky, which grew gray with clouds. Custer and the Sioux made of papier-mâché were still fighting on Pont des Arts, now in a creeping mist. Then a light drizzle began to wet the cobbles on the island.
“Regarde,” François called when he saw a fish jump, “belle gobage!” Then he raised his rod and reeled in a good bream. The broad fish bled as he took out the hook and slid it back down the wall into the water.
The first barge up the river was heaped with asphalt and hung low in the water. The first two men on the island were the cleanup crew who came to pick up all the empty wine bottles and scrape the wax from the cobbles with razors. The pigeons scavenged food between the melted candles. An old man walked among the roses with his dog.
The pêcheur brought in his lines. The drizzle became rain and the rain came harder and the gray zinc roof of the Hôtel de Ville was black.
SEA MONSTERS
Spring was easing into summer and we’d had two solid weeks of rain, which brought the level of the river up to February levels and beyond. Pierre began to get excited, not about the opening of fish art that André had organized, but the fishing.
“With the flood we may have another chance for a silure. They will begin to chase the bream that congregate in the eddies behind the islands.”
The date of the gallery opening had arrived. Marie-Annick contributed several watercolors and pastels of salmon, bream, and carp, and François had carved several trout and a pike from a dead apple tree. Pierre and I were out on the river fishing as they were setting up at the Larock-Granoff Gallery for the vernissage.
It was raining, but the air was warm and fragrant with spring, so it was pleasant to stand on Ile Saint-Louis with a fishing rod in hand. The river had risen swiftly and was now over the lip of the wall on the island. We waded in ankle-deep water as we cast our jigs into the eddy.
“It’s strange,” Pierre said, “but the river now just reminded me of a salmon river—like the T
weed should be at this time. The first fish should be starting to run.” He wiped his gnomish nose with the back of his hand and reeled in his line. “I wish you had met Charles Ritz before he died. He was an elegant man, like André.
“Ritz spotted my talent as a fly caster and introduced me to salmon fishing when I was about your age. He took me to fish the remarkable Aaro of Norway,” Pierre said, speaking in a soft tone that was uncharacteristic of him. “The Aaro is a very short river, less than one kilometer, that empties into Sognefjord. Ritz was very good friends then with the grandson of Count Tolstoy, Sasha, who had a lease on the water.” Pierre laughed. “We had good times. I remember him telling Sasha one night about the Allier in France, the second longest Atlantic salmon river in the world, how beautiful a fishery it once had been. But even in Ritz’s time the salmon were in trouble.
“I should take you to see the Allier. It is maybe my favorite river. In Saint Valiene de Chaz, on the bank of the river, there’s a thirteenth-century stone church. The villagers built it to commemorate an early run of salmon that had saved them from starvation after a hard winter. In a normal year the fish reached the Saint Valiene by May—that year they were in by mid-March. The villagers thought it was a miracle! Maybe it was.” Pierre looked into the Seine. “I think we may even catch a salmon there.
“Well,” Pierre said, interrupting himself to look at his watch, “it’s eight, I have to take Marlin to school. Keep fishing; I’ll come back on my bicycle in an hour or so.”
I had fished so many times for the notorious silure without catching one that I believed I never would. When Pierre left I lost all confidence, and put down my fishing rod and stretched out on the marble bench behind me. I was very tired, but I did not want Pierre to return and find me there asleep. “What, you have given up already?” I could hear him say. I reluctantly rose again, grabbed the rod, and cast a jig out into the eddy. I let the lure sink to the bottom and reeled it back slowly.
My line stopped; I had hooked something and it was moving, throbbing at the end of the line, a fish. At first it didn’t feel that big, but then it came to the surface and boiled. It burrowed down like a mole in soft soil and then surfaced again, rolling, and pushing water like a drowning cow.
It moved in slow figure-eight patterns back and forth across the eddy. Moments later it surfaced again, slapping its tail and showing a bulbous white belly to the sky. I heard cries of amazement behind me and saw that I had attracted a small audience of people. One of them had his camera poised. A group of schoolgirls who spotted me fighting the fish as they crossed the Pont St.-Louis piled onto the tip of the island to watch. “C’est gros!” they exclaimed.
I fought the fish, careful not to put too much pressure on the line.
“Thirty kilos, peut-être,” I called to the collected crowd.
I tried to lift the fish from the bottom so that they could see it. By a clock that I could see through the branches of the twisted chestnut tree nearby, I saw I had been fighting the fish for ten minutes. Impatience was growing among the people on the tip of the île but soon I had the fish’s mouth up to the lip of the wall. I was close enough to try to get my hand under his gill and land him—I reached out and touched the soft white skin under his jaw, trying to get my hand in its mouth. His tiny white eyes with dark pupils looked blankly at me as he lingered there—then he slapped his giant tail and slipped off the cement lip back into the river. The line made a singing sound as it spun off the reel.
A short black-haired man sat on the cement bench, hurriedly taking off his shoes, rolling up his pants so he could come to my aid. Showing great heroism, he waded into the ankle-deep water and stood beside me, staring into the opaque yellow depths off the lip of the island. When I reeled the fish’s head up to the lip of the cement wall again, I handed him the rod. He walked slowly backward with it and I reached out over the edge of the island and put my hand in the fish’s giant mouth. Grabbing it by its lower jaw, I dragged it up into the shallow water over the cobbles.
“Dieu,” said the man, his eyes wide.
Shortly, Pierre arrived at the tip of the île on his bicycle and pushed through the crowd. “You got your silure,” he said, seeing the fish, bending over to look into its small bead-shaped eyes. “I am happy. It is fifty pounds easy.”
“It’s the biggest fish I’ve ever caught,” I said, smiling and looking at the big fish with admiration.
“And would you believe, they get much bigger,” Pierre stated.
I put my hand under its gill and held it up high as if it were the severed head of Medusa, to show everyone who had stopped to see what lived in the river they strolled along every day. I lowered the silure to the water again and strung a long rope through its gill and out the mouth so I could secure it to the lamppost. It was alive in the water until we decided its fate.
Pierre suggested I keep the fish. “François will want to see it,” he said, dialing him at the gallery with his cell phone. “He doesn’t believe me that they exist. He’s been wanting to catch one and eat it for years.”
François was setting up his sculptures when we called, but dropped everything to come down to the river to see the silure. André came too, and when they arrived I pulled the silure from the water and the two of them kneeled beside it as if it were an altar. There was something classical and peculiar in seeing André dressed in his jacket and tie beside the large fish.
“Quelle vache,” what a cow, he repeated over and over like a gentle mantra, staring into its blank, black-eyed-pea eyes.
I asked Pierre to pose with the fish and I sketched him with the sea monster. “Yannid will love you when she sees what you have caught,” Pierre said.
It was decided that the fish would be killed and eaten. Pierre took out his pocketknife and, laying the silure on a small spot of grass above the waterline, he stabbed it through its skull to kill it, and then cut open its belly, allowing masses of multicolored entrails, rounded and fluid like wind-filled sails, to spill onto the grass. Indeed, as André had said, it was a cow, as with the entrails came handfuls of tiny eggs attached by a mucous skein. François unfolded a large burlap sack and, stuffing the giant fish in, slung it over his shoulder and walked away.
The reception that night at the Larock-Granoff Gallery was standard as far as openings go, only there were not enough paper cups and bottles of champagne to go around. Yannid could not make it to the opening, news which would not have bothered me had it not been compounded with the remorse I felt in seeing the big fish killed.
I did not see the silure again until we went to François’s apartment for drinks and dinner after the opening. He had hung it by the head in the doorway so that everyone entering could see it and, thusly, had made me into a kind of unexpected hero. Everyone was awestruck by the strange, almost mythical creature that had come out of the river in downtown Paris. François’s young daughters, Euridice and Penelope, asked me how I came to catch it. I told them it struck my lure when I least expected it to, that I had caught it on the first cast after waking up from a nap on a bench.
“Maybe you never woke up,” Penelope said.
“When I was a girl,” began Euridice, smiling, “I told my father that I would marry the man who caught a silure of two meters and one-half.” The one I had caught was about one meter and one-half, more than four feet long. “I don’t think yours is big enough.”
The wine flowed freely in the dark apartment, drunk with sausages and cheeses, and a sturgeon pâté François had made.
The next morning Pierre got a call from his friend Jean-François, who was flying from Paris to Dublin and had seen my picture in the Parisian daily paper. “There’s a picture of your American friend holding a silure on the cover of Le Parisien,” Jean-François said. One of the witnesses of the catch that morning had been a journalist. The same picture of the pêche au gros!, as it was described, appeared days later in the national paper, Le Figaro, and subsequently in the Nice Matin. The caption read:
Insolite: P�
�che au gros!
You don’t need to go to the Caribbean Sea to rub shoulders with marine monsters. Here at 10:30 A.M. a fisherman pulled from the Seine a silure, a giant version of a catfish, estimated to be 25 kilos. A prize, fulfilled after a long fight with feet in the water, it was led to the tip of Ile Saint-Louis by…an American tourist.
THE HAUTE SEINE—THE VINE LIFE
François, Pierre, and another friend of theirs whom they called Lulu planned to continue the festivities of the vernissage the next day by going fishing on the upper Seine for trout and grayling.
The Seine near its source, a two-hour drive from downtown Paris, was a beautiful spring-fed trout stream, winding peacefully through bucolic pastureland on the border of Champagne and Burgundy.
Driving us all in his van, François pulled over at the first vineyard we came to in Champagne, Veuve Cheurlin. It was not a large vineyard and they had no formal tasting room, so the four of us walked into the small office and asked the woman in attendance if we could taste some champagne.
First she brought out their reserve brut and poured us each a small glass.
“Yes, that is just okay,” said Pierre, “can we try another?”
The woman brought out another bottle, peeled off the foil, and pulled the cork. “Yes, this is better,” said Pierre, tasting it, “but let me try a little more of it.” She poured him a small bit and he gulped it down.
“Is your reserve the best?” François said.
“No,” she said, “our cuvée prestige brut is the most expensive.” Pierre stared at her expectantly and she sent a boy to get a bottle. She opened it and poured a bit in each of our glasses. Pierre took out a pen and paper and did some figuring, wiping his mouth with his hand. “I’ll take eighteen bottles of the prestige,” he said, and the woman hid her smile.
With the van full of champagne we came into Burgundy. François turned off the road onto a dirt path through hay fields dotted with red poppies until we came to a small silver trailer in a field. He kept it there as a fishing shack by permission of the farmer; the trout stream was a short walk across a wide field.