Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  The third afternoon, we stopped in Les Eyzies, a village so small that walking from one end to the other takes fifteen minutes at most. But it’s at the center of an area that contains a great number of painted caves and other prehistoric sites. The famous painted cave Lascaux is not far away, in Montignac. The Cro-Magnon Rock Shelter, the Abri Cro-Magnon, where the first bones of what scientists now call anatomically modern humans were discovered in 1868, is at the edge of town, behind a hotel near the tiny railroad stop. The Musée National de Préhistoire is also there, having been carved into the steep, rocky cliffs behind the town. Vivian and I visited the museum, then walked along a balcony where Vivian was horrified by a statue she described as “a naked caveman.” The balcony looks down on the town and the Vézère River, which makes a huge bend at the town and then runs along a distant row of cliffs to the left. Straight ahead, beyond the river, is a flat plain that stretches to the far horizon. People—anatomically modern humans, which is to say people like us—have been living along these cliffs by that river continuously for twenty-five thousand years or more. It was easy to see why. The cliffs were a barrier, so nothing human or animal could sneak up from behind. Overhangs in the cliffs provided shelter where a well-placed fire would keep marauding animals at bay. There was plenty of water, and the herds of animals who came for water themselves could be seen from the cliffs even when they were far in the distance. Hunting would have been good and food plentiful. And there was something else that I thought would have been important to those distant ancestors and should not be ignored: the scene that lay before us—the curving river, the lush plain, the cliffs to the left far beyond—was beautiful. Long ago, people just like us had chosen to live here. They had had practical reasons for doing so, but I believe they must have had aesthetic ones as well. I didn’t know it at the time, but the idea for my second book was born as I stood with Vivian, quietly looking across that verdant landscape.

  And it’s no surprise to find that Les Eyzies is a popular vacation destination in France, especially for families who enjoy the outdoors. There is good hiking, canoeing, fishing, and camping. The little town swells enormously during July and August. Far to the southeast, in the Ardèche, is a painted cave called Chauvet, high on a hill that overlooks a river and a natural bridge named Pont d’Arc. That is also a popular vacation destination in the summer. The natural features of a landscape that attracted people in prehistory still attract people today.

  The last afternoon, when we stopped at the top of a hill to rest the horses, Vivian walked away to explore a little. A few minutes later, she shouted, “Hey, gang, wild strawberries!” I would not have seen them, but the small plants were everywhere once you knew to look. Their berries were tinier than any I had ever seen, barely the size of green peas. But they produced so much flavor that we ate them one at a time, in order to give each powerful little morsel its due.

  The next day, Annabelle drove us to the station where Vivian and I boarded a train for Lyon. We said warm goodbyes. We didn’t say so, but all of us assumed that these goodbyes would be forever. But that wasn’t the case. By chance I would see Annabelle ten years later, with Tracy.

  * * *

  . . .

  Tracy and Ben arrived in Lyon a little before Vivian and I did. As our train was pulling in, we could see them waiting for us, surrounded by luggage. Tracy was waving her hand and smiling. Ben was smiling, too, but a little self-consciously. He had his guitar strapped to his back.

  We gathered our luggage—thirteen pieces in all!—and waited for the train to Roanne, the small town where Tracy and I had stopped thirteen years before. René, the owner and director of L’École de Trois Ponts, was waiting to meet us at the train. The school was in a medium-sized château technically in the city of Roanne but just on the edge and off enough by itself so that it seemed to be in the country. (The school still exists but in a different château not far away and with different ownership.) Tracy and I had a room, and Ben and Vivian were in separate rooms. All the rooms had large windows that let in plenty of light and were comfortably appointed with antique furniture. We had chosen this school over many other possibilities because it had both language instruction and a cooking school that Tracy was eager to try. The instructor in the cooking school had worked at Les Frères Troisgros.

  Learning to speak French was a goal Tracy and I had set for ourselves after our first trip to Paris. She was fluent in Spanish, one of the reasons our maid, Rosie, had bonded so strongly with her. So Tracy thought that learning French would be easy enough. I was under no delusions. I had no ear for languages and had almost not graduated from Rice University because I came close to failing the required upper-level French course. Tracy took two semesters of French at Austin Community College; I worked with a private tutor on Sunday afternoons. When French in Action appeared on PBS, Tracy and I became devoted watchers. In our cars, we followed various instructional tapes by repeating phrases as we drove. Despite all that, we didn’t make much progress. It’s probably more accurate to say that we didn’t make any progress at all. If someone spoke French to us, we seldom understood. Nor could we read French with any facility.

  Although they never complained, I know now that Ben and Vivian were mildly bored during the two weeks we were there. They dutifully attended their French lessons. They were polite and often charming at meals with the other people at the school, who were all older. But neither Ben nor Vivian was in the mood to learn much French. The only time I heard Ben say a single French word was when we played Ping-Pong each evening, after dinner, and I insisted on keeping score in French. Sometimes the two of them would walk across a pasture to a canal with a footpath running beside it. René had a big, goofy, lovable blond Labrador who liked to tag along. Or, leaving the dog behind, they walked for thirty minutes in the other direction to arrive at the center of town. They were most intrigued by French school supplies, which seemed to them more mature and refined than similar products in the stores at home, especially the notebooks. Their pages were printed in a grid rather than just lined. In fact, it’s difficult to find a notebook in France whose pages aren’t printed in a grid. It’s a tiny Gallicism that I’m fond of myself.

  Tracy and I, however, were never bored, even for a moment. We happily, almost joyfully, did our homework together. It was like a study date in college, although we really did study. We set about memorizing verb conjugations and quizzed each other on past participles. We knew so little, despite our tapes and other stabs at learning French, that everything we learned now seemed like huge progress.

  The chef at the cooking school was a tall, pale man about forty who was slyly funny in his heavily accented English. He was so adept that Tracy found some aesthetic pleasure even in watching him crack an egg. The other students in the cooking class included a couple from Baton Rouge, who were bureaucrats who worked for the state of Louisiana. They had no interest in learning French, but were very interested in cooking. At home, they both had Sunday off; he also had Wednesday off, and she had Saturday. He spent all day Wednesday shopping for and cooking an elaborate meal. They ate leftovers until Saturday, when she spent all day cooking enough for a feast that night and enough more food to last until Wednesday. They spent some time each evening during the week leafing through cookbooks to find new dishes, the more exotic and difficult to prepare the better. Every Saturday and Wednesday night, they went out to dance to Cajun music. Evidently, dancing and cooking formed a perfect balance. They were both slender and radiantly healthy.

  One night, they hosted a dance party at the school. They had brought a handful of CDs by Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys and other Cajun bands. They put one on and started all of us dancing by giving some small bits of instruction here and there. Tracy liked dancing, and I liked dancing, but neither one of us danced well. We hadn’t had a lesson since seventh grade. But that night, thanks to some tips from our Cajun friends from Baton Rouge, we were much less bad than usual.


  Afterward, as we lay in bed, we talked for a long time about what we wanted our life together to be. We had already been married for twenty years and were looking forward to twenty more, but our marriage was a shared project that we had been making up as we went along. The couple from Baton Rouge lived a different way. All the cooking and the dancing and the comfortable regularity appealed to both of us. In our late-night reverie, we could imagine ourselves living just that way. I would learn to cook, we would both learn to dance, and we wouldn’t need anything else. We would have a modest but pleasant, comfortable, and fulfilling life. It didn’t sound bad.

  “Of course,” Tracy said after a pensive silence, “we can’t start until Ben and Vivian are out of college.” Our new friends had no children. And they both admitted—bragged, actually—that their jobs with the state of Louisiana were not the least bit demanding. I liked my job, but even though I was taking this entire month off to travel, it was demanding and required long hours. And Tracy wanted to make money herself—enough money to support herself if something happened to me, but also for the feeling of independence it would give her. Money always created friction between us. Every eight or ten months, we would make each other angry as we spent a long evening together trying to create a household budget. The next day, with perfect aplomb and implicit mutual consent, we ignored the budget we had argued about the night before and went right back to making things up as we went along.

  Being reminded of Ben and Vivian punctured our dream of ourselves as dancing cooks. “I don’t really think it’s for us after all,” Tracy said, not with a sigh but with a short laugh. We decided to enjoy our trip while it lasted and not to worry. We would figure everything out when we got back home.

  * * *

  . . .

  The two weeks at the school went rather slowly for Vivian and Ben and quickly for Tracy and me, but none of us were sorry to get on the train for Paris. We had rented an apartment on the rue des Rosiers, in the Marais. Today this whole quarter, and the rue des Rosiers in particular, has blossomed into one of the most chic and trendy areas of Paris. It’s filled with small boutiques selling the newest fashions and sleek bars selling artisanal cocktails. If you’re walking among the large crowds that are drawn to the area on a Saturday afternoon, it’s easy to become convinced that no one in the whole world is older than twenty-three.

  But in 1995 it still had vestiges of the large Jewish community who once lived around the rue des Rosiers. The beautiful Art Nouveau Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue stood at the end of the street. Its rippling, wavy façade was designed by Hector Guimard, who also designed the curving cast-iron entrances to the Métro. And almost directly across the street from us, Jo Goldenberg’s delicatessen was still open and very popular. In 1982, it had been in headlines around the world when terrorists attacked the restaurant with a bomb and machine guns, killing six people and wounding twenty-two others. The attackers weren’t identified until more than three decades later. Although that attack had occurred thirteen years before this visit, a reminder of the lingering danger still remained. Heavily armed soldiers in burgundy berets stood guard by the synagogue and routinely patrolled the neighborhood.

  Our apartment was on the third floor. The biggest room was the kitchen. It contained a large table, which was the only place to sit in the apartment. The bathroom was next to the kitchen, but it held only a shower and a sink. The toilet was in a small closet right next to the stove, so any delicate need for privacy had to be overcome. There was one very small bedroom, with one very small bed, which Tracy and I took for ourselves. The long, narrow living room overlooked the street. It had two facing couches that served as beds for Vivian and Ben. They both liked to stand at the window, watching people on the street below.

  Our first morning there, we set out into Paris and went immediately to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Ben and I had once climbed the steps up the inside of the Statue of Liberty to the crown, but neither one of us was ready to climb now and we gladly took the elevator. We all exclaimed about the view, and it is indeed a nice view, but we all knew that the real purpose of going there was not to enjoy the view but to be able to say that you had been to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  It was impossible to tell what impression the Louvre made on Ben and Vivian. They dutifully stared at the Mona Lisa, but it was surrounded by crowds and difficult to see and impossible to enjoy. Other paintings or sculptures would catch their eye now and then, although only the Winged Victory, at the top of the long marble staircase, made a strong impression. Ben spent much of his time looking at two pretty French girls about his age who were happily touring the museum together. I thought they might have been teasing him a little by taking pains to cross his path time and again.

  The Rodin Museum, though, was a success. They both knew The Thinker, and that gave them a place to start. They saw Rodin’s other works as variations on The Thinker, which isn’t entirely true but not a bad first hypothesis. And the museum is really a house with gardens—a large, impressive house with large, impressive gardens, to be sure, but still recognizably a house. It’s a more familiar setting than the cavernous Louvre.

  And they liked randomly walking here and there along the streets of Paris. Sometimes, in the afternoon, we let them go out on their own. The first time they did this, as I found out much later, they went straight to a McDonald’s and ordered beer. They had done enough of their own research before the trip to discover that McDonald’s in Paris served wine and beer, and that the legal drinking age for wine and beer at that time was sixteen.

  By chance, we were there for the Fête de la Musique. That Wednesday, June 21, James Brown was giving a free concert at the Place de la République, not too far from the rue des Rosiers. We all wanted to go. As I’ve mentioned, during the summer in France it doesn’t get dark until ten or so. Though the concert probably wouldn’t start until then, we walked over shortly after dinner, thinking that if we were early enough we could find a good spot. But every block closer to République the crowd on the sidewalk grew thicker. At the République itself, the crowd was impenetrable. We were stuck at the edge, far from the stage.

  Vivian was undaunted: she was convinced that she saw an opening through the crowd that we could use to get closer. With Vivian leading and all of us holding hands in a line behind her, we plunged in. We did penetrate ten yards or so, but then the opening ahead closed and the crowd behind us closed, too. We were stuck and immobile while the crowd around us pulsed with trapped energy. I thought that if I lifted my feet off the ground, I would not fall—I’d be supported by the press of bodies around me.

  I had Ben’s hand and Tracy’s hand. Tracy was holding Vivian’s hand. We all gripped as tightly as we could. I realized—in fact, we all realized—that if we lost hold of Ben and Vivian we wouldn’t know how to find them again and they wouldn’t know where to go or what to do. Just then, a drunken boy about eighteen, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, started pushing us aggressively from behind, all the while shouting insistently in French. He kept pushing and pushing. He was about to break us apart, so I had no choice. I lowered my shoulder and pushed him back, hard. He hadn’t expected that, but he quickly regrouped and came at us again, this time threatening a karate chop where I was holding on to Ben. Again, I had no choice. I let go of Tracy’s hand, thinking that this was why I’d done all those early-morning workouts at Richard Lord’s Boxing Gym. I hit him as hard as I could with an uppercut to his diaphragm, hoping to knock the wind out of him. I don’t know if I did or not, but he did fade back and disappear as the crowd surged around us. That’s the only time I’ve hit anyone in anger in my life. Tracy and Vivian were forcing their way out, and I followed as best I could, pulling Ben behind me. I was near the edge of the crowd when Ben was caught and couldn’t budge no matter how hard I pulled. Both our arms were stretched out completely. Six or eight people stood between us, pushing and swaying. I looked at Ben. His eyes were wide with fear and looki
ng directly into mine. I thought that if our grip was broken the crowd would swell around and over him and he would be lost forever. So I held on and held on and pulled, and finally there was a small opening in the crowd and we could move again. Tracy and Vivian were just ahead. We got out of the Place de la République and across a broad boulevard and down another street. There were still people around, but not so many. We stopped for a moment, all breathing heavily. “I guess we’re not going to hear James Brown,” Vivian said.

  We wandered a bit after that. Every small café had music of some sort, and there were plenty of musicians on the street corners, playing blues, jazz, or French chansons. We stopped in one café where a tall, thin woman in a formal gown played lovely classical music on the violin. Away from the milling crowd for James Brown, the night was fresh and easy, with a wonderful air of freedom. We all went to bed happy. We could still hear distant music floating on the night air. The next morning, I went out early to buy croissants for breakfast. It was a mild day with a clear blue sky. I was astonished to see that the streets were completely clean. Workers in the night had hauled the trash away, and every trace of the Fête de la Musique had vanished.

  One afternoon, we took a train out into the country to see a demanding horseback competition called “eventing” that combines riding cross-country, jumping, and dressage. We got off the train at a small village and walked from there to an immense, rolling meadow where the cross-country course had been erected. We could see four or five of the obstacles, but we couldn’t see the whole course. As we stood near the starting line, a rider would take off at a gallop and disappear into the distance, only to reappear several minutes later and confront the obstacles nearer to us. One was a large burning ring the horse had to jump through. Another was a small hill with a fence at the top and a ditch with water on the other side. Still another had two fences, separated by a trench in between; the horse and rider had to clear both fences in a single jump. Each obstacle was more dangerous than anything Vivian or I would ever attempt, but watching these horses and riders take them with aplomb thrilled us, especially seeing the horses fearlessly jump through the burning ring.