Villefranche - Sur - Mer
I read Hemingway that summer and reeled at his ability to animate everyday life and caste light on the subtle battle. The train rocked along the tracks, side to side all the while pulling forward, and south toward the ocean. The siren wailed, melancholy, down through. Families around me chattered in Italian, gesticulating roundly and inflecting the last word of each sentence and names. The Mamma unloaded lunch from her handbag: leftover pasta which she had fried in a skillet until it looked like a little pasta pie. She sliced and distributed it like one too and the starched sweet smell of the noodles was unleashed into the air conditioned atmosphere. Her husband was served first.
As we got closer to the equator, the passengers started speaking French, perfumes and colognes were exchanged, too, Italian for French, as soon as we crossed some invisible line. Train terminals always smell like college students living out of their backpacks and urine and are full of people speaking too loud so as to be heard above the other people speaking loudly and children shrieking and running in unpredictable zigzag patterns while their parents pay no mind to the fact that other people do not find them endearing. I focused on the empty street to my left and willed my way, with determination, away from the crowd, passing a few mangy cats on the way. French cats. I wondered if they were different from Italian cats.
At sunset, just as the sky was casting twilight, I found myself in town. Handsome people sat in cafes drinking bitter espresso or bitter aperitif. The young people smoked cigarettes and wore sunglasses despite the failing light. Young eyes do not care. I ordered a cosmopolitan and the waiter (smart man) told me that I had “cat’s eyes,” which I promptly scribbled onto my cocktail napkin after he walked away. I lit a cigarette so that I had something to do. Later, after more drinks and before dinner, a French cowboy came and sat down at my table. He had with him a photo album full of pictures showing him getting thrown off bulls in Texas, Wyoming, and Berlin. He wore a big silver belt buckle, Wranglers and a cowboy hat, but he was still French and I would never have believed he rode bulls if he did not have that album to prove it. I studied him hard and wondered if I would accept him as a cowboy if he did not have a French accent. His jaw was squared off and his five o’clock shadow was right on time. The crease down the front of his jeans could have cut glass. I decided I would not have because a real cowboy would never wear his hat at the table, but I was lying to myself because I romanticized American men in those days.
Somewhere around 10:00, as the stars were revealing themselves, a bottle of Absinthe appeared at our table, complete with tiny slotted spoons and cubes of sugar. Many more people had materialized by then: a man, whose name I cannot remember poured the green syrup over the sugar cube, then dripped a short stream of water and the potion turned white. Those handsome people - men with collars popped under their suit jackets, women with tight slacks and too much perfume and the French cowboy – spoke to one another in various languages that made me ashamed to have been born in a country run by the now grown up children of the Summer of Love. I was grateful that there was a Brit there. He whispered humid translations onto my neck until the men got too friendly and their wives spoke to them in harsh tones. I contemplated falling in love with the Brit, just for something to do, but thought better of it in the end. My heart cannot be spread that thin.
I lay on my bed back at the hotel and listened to the crickets outside my open window. French crickets. I tried to imprint their score in my memory forever.
posted by trish @ 5:50 PM
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