I was back in Paris for an interview for an interpreter’s job at the La Villette exhibition center. It was the sweaty, sagging fag-end of summer 1977. I was, as usual, nearly broke; notwithstanding which I booked a room at the swank Hotel Pierre 1er de Serbie on the elegant street of that name, off the Champs-Elysées. I planned a quiet evening, as usual (Dr. Jekyll firmly in charge): the hotel room, a frugal dinner and the train journey, sans plus. With cunning foresight, however, proving that Mr. Hyde was lurking in the back office, I signed in at the hotel as “Docteur Boislent” and explained that I was in town for an osteopaths’ convention (“conférence d’ostéotherapeutes”) and was, accordingly, addressed as “M. le Docteur” by the credulous or indulgent staff who were, anyway, courteous and efficient. And what a night I could have had in their hotel, sunk deep in restorative sleep between the satiny sheets of my Louis XVish bed! A color TV, room service, and a view of the Champs, then rising refreshed to a tartine beurrée and coffee, a smoke while contemplating the early-morning activity of the elegant thoroughfare outside, and a leisurely jaunt up to La Villette …and who knows, I might even have been offered the job. Instead of which, my patient reader will not be surprised to learn, the following mad scenario evolved.

                Beer, then more, then wine, then, as the tank slowly filled up, anisette, and not in the swank neighborhood of the Hotel Pierre 1er de Serbie, where a demi went for the price of a full meal; no, I’d wandered over to Les Halles, the anodyne shopping precinct where the ancient food markets, Zola‘s “belly of Paris,” had once roiled, in Zola’s day, and as recently as mine; in fact, I remember my six-year-old self going there at night with my parents and being plied with a scummy bowl of onion soup because it was “what the French ate” (I refused and was mildly chastised)…but that was in 1956. Twenty-one years later it was the halcyon age of dispiriting “modern” architecture—or “architecture”—and the Beaubourg, or Pompidou Center, was of course its gorge-rising climax, or nadir. I passed by on the qui vive, as always, for unattached Claudia Cardinale look-alikes seeking drunken foreign paupers for a night of fun. Seeing none, I cast a desultory eye over the mob of mimes and sword-swallowers and jugglers who haunt the sidewalks outside the (then-ghastly, now-quaint) Pompidou Center. Such antics have always bored me, so I had another few demis at the Café des Sports down the street and was turning to summon additional refreshments when I caught the glittering eye of the Butterfly Man. Darkness was falling, but he stood out like a palm tree on the tundra. Great gossamer wings with bright orange-and-purple dots drooped from his shoulder blades, tastefully setting off his green-and-yellow body stocking. He had close-cropped black hair and a bushy black Stalinian mustache. I sized him up as a foreigner more foreign than the French; he sized me up as an English-speaker.

                “Hi,” he said. In the aspirated “h” of “hi” (kkhhaï) I detected a guttural je ne sais quoi of Slavic origin. Sure enough:

                “I Boris,” he said. “You?”

                “Not Boris,” I said, wittily. He pulled up a chair. We had beers, paid for by me, then Pernods. We had more, and discussed Paris; then he said, in a woman’s breathy voice.

                “Oh, you are handsome man.”

                “I don’t think so, but thanks.”

                Boris hooted with laughter, wings spasmodic in delight.

                “Is not I,” he gasped. “Is her. She?” He pointed to a pale and heavily made-up blonde sitting next to the door of the cafe. She waved.

                “Will you like to buy me a drink?” Boris inquired in his husky Mae West voice—or rather, as I now realized, she inquired, throwing her voice and using Boris as her ventriloquist’s dummy. It was all one way, he explained. He couldn’t throw his voice worth a damn, but she was so good she’d done it to a party boss at a Party Congress in Prague or Warsaw and caused quite an uproar when the man announced from the podium: “Comrades,  I am deep down really a woman. I am going to have a sex change in Morocco.” They’d perfected the act since being driven out of Bulgaria or Poland or perhaps Mother Russia herself.

                  She was easily persuaded to join us when it became apparent that Muggins was paying for the drinks.  

                “I Natasha,” she said, with fluttering false eyelashes and tightly-crossed legs sheathed in fishnet.

                “Yeah,” I said. “I’m Rory Rover. Drink?”

                Of course, and many more, well into the nighttime realm lit up in sporadic lightning-flashes of clarity. The myth upon which they loosely based their act, it seemed, was Ukrainian, or Bielorussian: A butterfly (babochka) is the harbinger of the wolf (volk), who throws his voice like Red Riding Hood to allure. Innocent creatures frolic around the pretty butterfly.  Then, like Stalin, Comrade Wolf comes from the forest and devours one and all, butterfly included.

                “Bat zis batterfly, he living only one day,” whispered Natasha, who was all over me at first, lacquered fingernails firmly digging into my crotch. “So what he cares?”

                “Nichevo,” said I, fluent in my remembered schoolboy’s Russian.

                We rode the metro eastward, toward Smolensk, but got off at the Place de la Bastille. Then, in the dressing-room of a small theatre, I tried on Boris’s butterfly wings and danced a tango with Natasha. Well, Humani nihil a me alienum puto, boasted Terence: “Nothing that is human is alien to me.” True for me, too, especially after a few drinks. That evening I ended up onstage in that small Bastille theatre dancing a crude form of the kazachok, elbows linked with Boris and Natasha, watched in silence by—I’m almost sure, but I won’t swear to it—an audience of Africans. An emotional Russian kind of yelling with pale strained faces and extravagant hand gestures preceded and followed the onstage performance. Natasha sought refuge in my arms from the brutal Butterfly Man, then violently pushed me away and resumed the Old Slavonic yelling match. Somehow I found my way to a small café table, where I engaged in quiet conversation with a grave bespectacled Senegalese gentleman on the subject of the distinguished Senegalese president and man of letters, Léopold Sédar Senghor (photo above), and Senegal, French literature, and world affairs generally.  The Senegalese gentleman and I reached a polite consensus and clinked glasses. Whatever the subject of our agreement, at least I recall no animus and no scenes of violence, which in my experience are the last impressions to fade from memory. (I dismiss almost completely the hypothesis advanced by Mnemosyne that this gentleman was in fact President Senghor himself, although His Excellency was then, as it happens, in town for his accession to the Académie Française; yes, I dismiss this notion almost completely.)  

            Anisette mingled its snot-green waters with Algerian red and “33” beer—“the beer of the Foreign Legion” I hear myself booming, as in an echo chamber, with monotonous frequency, in French and English. Rosy-fingered dawn reached over Boris and Natasha doing their ventriloquist’s number at a bal musette next to the Père Lachaise cemetery, he playing, not the wolf-butterfly skit, but a gentle melancholic character out of Chekhov hearing a voice—his own (Natasha’s, actually)—like Raskolnikov’s, and being driven mad by it; it was a touch Beckettian, actually, and quite moving, if a bit too Slavic for Sam, if not for (say) Ionesco, who might have been there, too, disguised as a rhinoceros… echt-Russische, anyway, but a big hit with the now-Chinese audience. (Or were they Vietnamese?) And of course when breakfast rolled around and the last anisettes were drained and the dread words “Time to go” hovered overhead, an attempt to break into the famous boneyard next door was inevitable, given the dramatis personae and their general state of intoxication and the universal urge to kneel at Jim Morrison’s grave. Not I: I fancied Chopin, but: “Dzhim! Dzhim!” cried Natasha, like most Russians a devotee of American pop culture. Somebody knew of a back way into the cemetery that required no more than a hop, skip and jump over a flimsy gate or so, and there we all were, just down from Heloise and Abelard, with me staggering about looking for the Polish piano bard (I found him years later, during a more sober visit). Natasha sobbed uncontrollably in Boris’s arms at the threshold of the dead Door. Boris by this stage was wingless and had changed into a grimy business suit, looking like a salesman of second-rate perfumes, and in his new incarnation he was treating me with the contempt I deserved for having subsidized their evening.

                  “Shtazhitye, pozhaluistvo,” he said. “YANKEE GO KHOM,” or words to that effect. Fade to black at that point, mercifully, and during that prolonged ebony moment of non-memory I somehow negotiated the width and breadth of Paris and arrived in the soft bed of my room at the Pierre 1er just in time to wake up with enough money to get me back to my mother’s house in Ferney or to pay the hotel bill, but not both; so I weighted down my overnight bag with the Michelin Red Guide and four pairs of underpants and, assuming my most businesslike air, handed the bag to the receptionist.

                “Could you watch this for me for a while, mademoiselle? I have a medical emergency to attend to. Madame la Comtesse has dislocated her shoulder. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.”

                “Bien sûr, Monsieur le Docteur.”

                I sincerely hope no punishment befell the girl when the hours passed and there was no sign of the gruff but genial Dr. Boislent….  

                 The job interview was conducted by a courteous young man in a business suit who somewhere along the line came under the misapprehension that I was a dairy farmer from the Jura Mountains.     

            “What kind of milking cows do you favor, M. Boislent? Jerseys or Holsteins?” was one of his questions. “Do you make soft blue cheese? Or hard? Is it then a question of date or paturage?” Nothing I said seemed to dissuade him, so finally I played along and invented a herd of Jerseys, a pig or two, some chickens, and a large family, including a bedridden grandfather, an earnest schoolteacher-wife named Adèle (very vivid, this one: I saw her on her way to and from the local Lycée and in and out of her light-blue Citroen Dyane, her brown hair disheveled under a casually elegant Hermès scarf, her overladen shoulderbag causing a slight list to port), and our several children: Blaise, Marlène, Gilles…. I was, I conceded, an unusual applicant for the position of English interpreter, and we further agreed that on the whole I would probably be happier back on my muddy acres in the Jura, lugging slop buckets through the puddles, an old bird dog or two frolicking at my heels, chickens pecking in the dirt.

                 “So, save me some cheese, hein?” said the young chap heartily, as we shook hands. “No one makes better bleu than you Jura dairymen.”

                 My homecoming at Ferney that time was a frosty one. Clearly, the era of live-in sons was at an end. I hung on through a grim Christmas, but soon after that we had a good old heart-to-heart, my mother and I, during which she explained whither, once her threshold was crossed, life’s unwinding highway might lead: To America, land at the end of a million rainbows, and the home of her brother, an English professor, who lived in a Long Island suburb of New York with his wife and daughters. That could be my home while I “got oriented.” Uncle Tom was contacted and proved amenable. Reservations were made, tickets purchased, and in February ‘78 I was ready to go.

                So, after so long, America. Land, to me, of hustle and hustlers and vast plains and skyscrapers and air conditioning and obscurantism. But Britain wouldn’t have me, and I’d given Ireland a chance, and France was becoming difficult, and Switzerland was closed for good…and, most importantly, Mum was fed up.

            Yes, after a quarter of a century my life as an expatriate was at an end. At long last, America was calling. I was going home.

                (Or “home.”)