Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. (Photo is of the RMS Queen Elizabeth.)
Of the transatlantic journey that links me to that bygone era
of great ocean voyages that is in turn linked to all of previous seaborne human
history, I recall only teasing episodes: the bustle and excitement of boarding
the Queen Elizabeth; the dark water
slopping ominously, far beneath the steep gangway; the brilliance of the light
at sea; the briny ocean-smell; the miniature salt and pepper shakers on the
dining tables; the tiny fences around the edges of said tables to prevent
cutlery and dishes and miniature salt-and-pepper shakers from crashing to the
floor in heavy seas; the lifeboats, trussed up like cocoons; and a girl my age,
Patricia Hedges, with whom I became infatuated and whom, incredibly, I ran into
fourteen years later in Greece…but more of that later (see “Greece,” below—but
not yet). She was my first light o’ love. I reckon I was quite precocious,
falling in love at age five. “Patricia!” I screamed from the deck, as the
tender took her ashore at Southampton. I was devastated, bereft, the victim of
first love. She waved, nonchalantly. I can see her doing so, from the gently
rocking tender, as if it had happened yesterday. Of course, if it had been up
to me, I would have gone ashore for the greatest romance between five-year-olds
the world had ever seen; but in that drizzly fall of 1956 my course was set for
France. Mum and I landed at Cherbourg and took a train to Paris. We moved into
the Normandy, a sub fusc old hotel on the Rue de l’Echelle, in the first
arrondissement near the Palais-Royal; and it was there, I can safely say, that
I was, as it were, born again.
The rupture in my destiny
represented by Florida one year, France the next—from America to Europe—gives
me in hindsight a priceless reason for the lifelong cultural schizophrenia that
has made of me a European in America, an American in Europe, and no more, or
less, than a citizen of the Western World everywhere else. The evolution of
that citizenship began in Paris. While Dad settled into a business routine that
I can’t imagine, but that probably involved more leaning on zinc-topped bar counters
than sweating out radio-broadcasting details, Mum and I lived at company
expense in the Normandy. I remember the grayness and sootiness of Paris then,
only eleven years after the end of the war that would always be the shadow in
the wings of my own life. The monuments and buildings had not yet benefited
from the cleanup efforts launched by André Malraux when he was De Gaulle’s
Minister of Culture, and were as black and grimy as they appear in photographs
of the Occupation. But on the streets the Citroens, Renaults and Panhards, most
black but some (especially 2CVs) gray and some even white (the Renaults),
symbolized the growing prosperity of the “Trente
Glorieuses,” the Glorious Thirty Years after the war, when France shot from
agriculture to hi-tech, from the rule of Pétain to that of (ex-Pétainist)
Mitterrand. But in 1956, change still lay ahead for most remnants of Vieille France: Many public toilets,
known as "vespasiennes"—and this was especially noteworthy for an
American—were redolent of ancient effluvia. The metros were the same old
rattletraps as in the 1940s (and as depicted in Truffaut’s Le Dernier Métro): red (second-class) or green (first-class)
boxcars with the dangling eye of a red or green lamp at either end. On the
walls of the tunnels between metro stations were the very same stammering
Dubonnet advertisements (“Dubo-Dubon-Dubonnet”), touting a product few could
then afford, that wartime straphangers had read over and over ad nauseam (did
anyone want a Dubonnet, post-Liberation?). Caporal smoke salted the air
everywhere. Aromatic hot chocolate and coffee came in bowls, accompanied by
long paper tubes of sugar. Bread was dense and yeasty, and its crust so crunchy
it cut the gums; more often than not, the baguette came sliced in two and
lathered in sugary jam rather than butter, except when it was a tartine beurrée, that lame French excuse
for a breakfast. Milk was sterilized, not pasteurized—ironically, in the land
of Pasteur. And I remember the smells: in the mornings, roast coffee and baking
bread; all day, Caporal smoke, diesel fumes, and the hot gusts from the metro’s
musty crypt that would waft upward from the sidewalk grilles below which the
trains clanked and groaned like mechanical Fafnirs and Fasolts.
