Lurking in the mind of every American visitor to this country is fear.
Outside of easy, social settings, are the French quite as civilized as their reputation suggests?
IN THE PROUDEST COUNTRY BY MICHAEL WASHBURN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 33
No-one back home could understand the terror Bryan felt in France that summer. No one would get it if Bryan said Paris was the last place on earth he wanted to be because you have to fight through the crowds in the sweltering air to feel the revulsion that overcame him that day in July 2007. He was glad to step onto a bus bound for Angers, in the Loire Valley, where he’d rest for a night before going on to a village where his sculptor friend owned a little house. As the dreary tenements of La Midi slid past, and the old couple in the seat ahead chatted about a scandal embroiling the National Front, Bryan reclined in relief and tried to banish the horrendous cliché looming in his mind: that he was escaping to “the real France”. The cliché could make you vomit.
Minutes later, the humidity passed its climax and raindrops began to dot the dusty road and the white and black roofs amid the patches of swaying stalks on either side of the bus. Back in Montparnasse, in the area around the hotel where Bryan had stayed, people must be retreating to the cafés and the apartments, but the crowds would never be gone for long, they would swarm again soon enough in their pursuit of wonder. To Bryan, they were so many locusts.
Before nodding off, he thought about his friend David who had grown from a bullying C-student in grammar school into an obsessive artist at Cooper Union and then at SUNY/Purchase. David’s paintings had appeared in exhibitions at Lincoln Center, he’d done a bust of a celebrity’s wife, and now he was taking advanced sculpting classes with about 30 Americans and Canadians in this village in the Vendée.
Bryan could only admire how serious his friend was and wonder how to find the same drive in his writing. Twenty-five, and he’d barely completed a story, let alone gotten one published. To date, the majority of his works were abortive, misbegotten attempts to fashion a tale out of an odd idea or scene that had occurred to him. Maybe he and David were just wired differently. The question of Bryan’s accomplishments came up again and again when friends of David’s got done talking about art and directed their curiosity toward his quiet friend. Maybe in a month in Les Cerqueux, Bryan could reverse the ratio of planned and completed fictions. Honestly, he’d be happy to produce one.
Bryan had another thought: Lurking in the mind of every American visitor to this country is fear. And a question: Outside of easy, social settings, are the French quite as civilized as their reputation suggests?
When he woke, the bus was hurtling through a zone where sodden green alternated with the tarmac as far as he could make out, a place where all nations, all uniforms and customs and holidays and drinking songs, seemed to Bryan like inventions conceived to stave off insanity. In about a half hour, he’d have to seek out another dive on the streets of Angers. The bleakness outside dimmed as the humming of the engine and the banalities passed back and forth by the elderly couple lulled Bryan until he nodded off once more.
When he arrived the next day in Les Cerqueux, Bryan could recall little of the night in Angers. He felt like lying down and kissing the streets of this anti-Paris where the only other being in sight was a lame dog that ambled up the cobbled street beside the church with its tongue lolling, jubilant to see the visitor. The houses across from the church were squat, a series of two stories and drab façades joined by thin plaster walls. Adequate, no more. Further up the road, Bryan made out bigger houses where the mayor and other local officials might have lived, and the road running perpendicular to where Bryan stood led to a one-storey café and a dépanneur and then to a grey region of hedgerows and corn.
He thought: Fear. It encroaches, climbs, darts, and weaves. It insinuates itself into thoughts and gestures, it distorts your face when you’re not thinking about anything in particular.
Bryan knocked on the door of one of the drab houses, which opened to reveal a forty-fiveish man in glasses, trousers, and a blue short-sleeved shirt from which two hairy arms extended. Beside him was a blonde in overalls, maybe 38, with a grin on her ruddy face. In French, Bryan asked which of these houses was David’s, and the man told him in English and asked whether Bryan was the writer David talked about so much. Bryan happened to have knocked on the door of one of the art teachers.
On David’s door, Bryan found a note stating that his friend would be back from sculpting class by six, so he sat down in the road—there was no sidewalk—and watched the funny dog, sections of its body bouncing and wobbling as it ambled and turned in the direction of the café, overtaken by a young man on a moped. A Mirage fighter jet roared through the skies, heading east. Bryan considered the church, imagining the still silence inside that had helped fold worshipers’ distance from God for so many centuries. Then another guy on a moped shot by. Damn, those look dangerous, Bryan thought. I might rent a bike and that’s it. I’d rather be slow than paraplegic.
When David showed up, he embraced the visitor, though Bryan did not like this type of physical contact, and gave him a tour of his modest house. The ground floor was quite spartan, with an easel on the upper floor. There were no books, a fact that reminded Bryan how David’s artistic skill and Bryan’s intellectual curiosity were not even distant relatives. In the hours that followed, Bryan met another art teacher, a rotund woman in her 40s with craggy blonde hair, two attractive young students named Cyprian and Tracy, and a trio of local officials wandering through the village. From the outset, he liked both Cyprian, a Toronto native of Polish descent, and Tracy, who’d grown up on Long Island and who sometimes gave hints of a romantic interest in David. Bryan’s fear became less conscious, less palpable.
