The man who loved bicycles. Memoirs of an autophobe, por Daniel Behrman, capítulos 4 a 6

Chapter 4
The Built-In Breakdown

Our cities have become a-creative. Once, they could offer promiscuity and isolation in the proper proportions. Moise Kisling, one of the Montparnasse painters of the Twenties, lived across the street from my Paris address. He could wander to the Dôme on Carrefour Vavin, meet his friends, drink with the others of the generation that funneled into Paris all the way from Poland to Mississippi; then he only had to walk a few hundred feet to be back on the bywater of our street where he could work to his soul's content. Not any more, Moise, not any more; by the time you reach the Dôme these days you need a stiff drink just to get over the trauma of getting over Boulevard du Montparnasse. I don't think you could get much work done in that studio of yours, either, you'd be worried too much about paying for it. Studios in Montparnasse are not for artists any more, they make great places for displaying objects by artists. Only the truly creative people of our time can afford them, people like psychoanalysts and real-estate agents, who can create money directly without going through any intermediate phases like canvas or stone.
So, Moise, I have to leave our street whenever I have any real work to do, anything that involves more than just going through the motions of work, more than repeating with but a slight variation what I had done the day or the year before. I have found a place in Brittany where it rains so often that the grass stays green all year long and the Parisians come only in July and August. You just keep going west from Montparnasse, out of the belt of wealthy suburbs that has its buckle on Saint Cloud bridge where the Autoroute de l'Ouest begins. You leave behind the Beverly Hills communes for film stars around Montfort-l'Amaury about twenty miles out, and after that the sailing is almost clear. Paris has smeared south towards Lyons and the Mediterranean; the high-speed trains run that way and so do the high-speed cars along the Autoroute du Sud. But going west towards Brittany, the Autoroute de l'Ouest peters out well before Montfort. There are forests and farms. When you go west by train, the country quickly becomes compartmented by hedgerows after the plains around Chartres. By automobile, the way can be almost as lonely, there are still roads that were used by the postriders and the stagecoaches. I take them to go to Lanloup on the Breton coast, where the words I have lost in Paris come back to me.
A few years ago, I might have gone to Lanloup by train. I could have taken an express to Saint-Brieuc, then the narrow-gauge branch line that ran down the coast. Brehec by the sea was a station for Lanloup a mile-and-a-half inland, the viaduct of the abandoned narrow-gauge line still stands there. It was built by giants, no doubt, the midgets who replaced them are not even up to the task of demolishing it. I might have come by the steam train that screamed on the viaduct like a gull over the cliffs, whistling with its two eaved passenger cars, a brake van, and two or three freight cars. I could have got off the train and taken a trop up the hill to the Duvals' café where I rent rooms right across the road from the Lanloup church. There I can work in the Seventies, it is the kind of place that my street in Montparnasse must have been for Kisling in the Twenties. I once arrived there on an Easter Sunday. I had to come by car because the bus that plies the corrugated roller-coaster track of a highway from Saint-Brieuc could not have carried my two bicycles. I wasted no time breaking out a bike and coasting down a road that runs from Lanloup to the sea through a valley carved out by the stream Kerguen. There were once seven mills on that stream, only one is left and it grinds no more.
On the beach at Brehec, just on the downstream side of the railroad viaduct, there was a sheen of wet sand in the artificial cove formed by a breakwater built many years ago to protect fishing craft. Most of the fishermen are long gone. In winter, there is only one working boat left in Brehec harbor, the Marcel Augustine, named after the parents of the two catlike young men I see aboard when they moor in the middle of the cove and scull a dinghy to the foot of the breakwater with a few crates of scallops.
The cove was empty on that Easter Sunday morning, it was awaiting the play-boats of the summer yachtsmen and the dinghy sailors. Except for two or three cafés, nothing was open in Brehec. The summer houses were shuttered against a miraculous Easter Sunday sun that sent me walking shirtless across the wet sand. The hotels were battened down for the winter, their windows not only shuttered but blinded by sheets of fiberboard nailed over them. I sat on the beach; I had half an acre of sand around me to blot my ink, but the sun and a breeze from the West dried it as soon as I wrote, dried it as fast as a ballpoint. I got back up the hill, pedaling against the grade and the trickle of the Kerguen, just in time to see and hear the twin bells of the Lanloup church calling the village and the countryside around for high mass, their clappers lolling like tongues inside their cupped brazen mouths.
Except for July and August, one is high and dry in Lanloup, safe beyond the reach of urban sprawl. It was not easy to find Lanloup. Nearly every other place I sought had been tainted by the car city. Mere distance from downtown is not enough protection, the car people can sprout wings and flutter off to the Bahamas or the isle of Elba. I once did a piece of work in a village on the Seine near Fontainebleau. A hundred years ago, there was no one there except a few farmers and a boatyard where wooden river barges were built. During the Twenties, it saw an epidemic of great summer houses, it looked something like the North Shore of Long Island except for the modest moat of the Seine instead of the mighty Sound at the feet of the houses. Then, after the war, it went back to the pre-car era, not much was heard except the river barges hooting for the lock in the early-morning fog. But the tide kept spreading out from Paris; it swallowed up Corbeil down the river; on the other side of the city it puddled east to overwhelm the Marne valley; finally it reached the village where I had once been able to work. Old country inns were either sold off as apartments or refurbished with plate-glass doors and thatched roofs. The village was not crowded, it was even emptier than it had been before, but I could not take my ease there any more. It was no longer a place to work; it will soon lose its identity, it has only a river and a rim of forest to protect it as a community from the car.
The car distorts communities just as it bloats and misshapes individuals. It literally deforms cities. I realized this a few years ago when I saw Leningrad for the first time. My eyes could not adjust to it, something was awry, it took me a while to realize what it was. For the first time in my life, I was looking at a classical city from head to foot. Leningrad was almost carless, it had not been amputated below the knee; from roof to street, I could take it all in. Every other old city I know is washed over by the tin flood, their monuments stand on a mobile junkyard. The car erodes these cities, it gnaws away at their feet, it throttles their windpipes, it consumes them. It must feed on them to grow, it must grow to keep producing its rewards for those who make and fuel it. That is why the car cannot solve any urban or suburban transportation problem. It is the problem. It must inevitably lead to the discarding of cities, for they are frightful places to park cars. Inevitably, too, we must have the exodus to the suburbs, frightful places to park people, those consumer parks where productive work is taboo, where there is nothing to do but drive and buy.
The leapfrogging starts, the suburb becomes the city, more cars are needed to get away from it, more roads are needed to carry the cars. Another chunk of the rural landscape is bitten off, chewed, digested in the intestinal tract, spat out as tracts. There is a premium on change, there is money to be made in tearing down and building anew. It is the car that is the prime mover of change; we use it to go places, to go from the places that it has made unbearable. They are left behind to become slums, no, ghettos, a new word that implies no chance to escape, not a stepping stone but a tombstone. The old communities in the United States are being wiped out and the new ones aborted. In Europe, an urban tissue constructed cell by cell over millennia is being shredded in a few moments for a new race of courtiers who demand of their cities only convenient parking during the week and an easy exit on the weekends.
Industry goes along with the exodus. IBM forsakes New York for Westchester, American Can runs to Connecticut. According to Robert Cassidy, a city planner writing in the New Republic, St. Louis lost forty-three companies to the suburbs in 1970 and, in two years, Boston found that seventy-five had gone. These are all clean industries, of course. It is the headquarters that move out, the hindquarters are left in the old urban industrial holes. These are executives and secretaries, they are clean livers, the only thing dirty about them is the cars that they drive. Yet that should be enough, as I know from my acquaintance with Paris. A canary could hardly survive in those parts of the city where the only activity is shopping and looking for a place to park. I'm not much on wine but I'm a pretty good air-taster and it's hard not to inhale on a bike. The worst breathing in Paris is not around the industrial north and east anymore but in the plush west, that ghetto of the rich, the festering avenues that move the tin carriage trade through Passy and Auteuil. Greenwich and Larchmont, take note, there' more than just money moving up from New York, the muck is coming along with it.
Mass transit does not stand a chance when it is placed against this kind of competition. As someone has pointed out, it must buck the laws of geometry. The farther you move from the center of a circle, the farther you must travel along the periphery and in those interstices the automobile multiplies. The commuter railroads of the nineteenth century were responsible for the hatching of our urban dinosaurs but, at least, they gave the countryside a chance, offering breathing spaces between stations and farmland between lines. The car butters the goo evenly over the whole circle, a homogeneous layer that cannot be scooped up in big enough quantities to make public transit worthwhile.
The automobile was never intended for cities, it is self-defeating there. In limited numbers, it could offer quick, convenient house-to-house door-to-door movement of goods and services, perhaps as quick and convenient as our great-grandparents enjoyed with horse cars, hansom cabs, and brewery wagons. The mass car breaks down in the city because there is a built-in breakdown. It is like the clowns' cars that fly apart at the end of the circus act. We build more freeways for it when it runs out of roads, then we run out of air.
Yet that is the saving grace of the full-power wheelchair in its present form. The crud over our heads is the ceiling of our automobile population. Far worse would be the pollution of the nonpolluting car. Then we could sextuple-deck the Long Island Expressway, shuffle off to Buffalo at the end of a day at the new World Trade Center down at the already drained Battery... but this is just science fiction. You can't burn oil without polluting and when cars stop running on oil, there is a chance that oil will stop running us and we will stop living on energy borrowed form geological time with no intention of repayment.
Since this energy is not ours, we feel no need to conserve it, we throw it away. Perhaps the throwaway car was the start of throwaway living. Never before have goods of such importance lost their value so quickly. Perhaps it is because they destroy rather than create. Creative work does not depreciate, it appreciates all the more in our car time as it becomes more and more scarce.
It is in moon travel that one finds the fastest depreciation of all. This is the ultimate projection of the car-travel society. There is instant depreciation; the booster stages and the fuel vanish, only the capsule arrives (with the relative residual value that my '47 Chevy would have today). Perhaps we get into trouble when our tools, our goods, do not live as long as we do. A house does, a trolley car or a locomotive or a steamship used to be good for a generation or two. The car cannot last because, it consumes itself as it consumes energy.
Sooner or later, it consumes us, mentally as well as physically. The car bestows power without responsibility. The airline pilot, the steamer captain, the locomotive engineer control much more power, but their every move is governed by skills that take years to acquire and rules that fix responsibility in every foreseeable circumstance. Not we in our cars; we get the power for nothing, we pay insurance companies to take the rap, thereby giving them a swollen role in shaping our world. The car puts all of us on horseback we can multiply our own speed and power as our predecessors could only by riding fleet horses, again almost a professional skill and certainly one that demands much more physical and psychological effort than guiding an automobile after a few hours of lessons.
So we are all men on horseback. In the United States, the man on horseback is the cowboy, a workingman in working clothes. His image has covered the world, he is imitated in Les Corrals du Far West on the banks of the Yonne or in dude ranches behind Mandelieu on the road to Cannes. His were the free and easy ways of Americans on horseback, they are transposed into the manners of the car driver in America. He gives the right of way to the weak, he stops to offer his help at a sign of trouble, it is the old fraternity of the cowboys on the plains. The Americans invented hitchhiking, a form of instant hospitality and generosity. Signs of such behavior are found throughout the United States, even in a city like New York. Scoffers (and I know there are many) are advised to try crossing a street or riding a bicycle in such cradles of civilization as Paris or Rome.
In mother Europe, the man on horseback has different meaning. His power is political, he is a military man, Napoleon crossing the Alps, General Boulanger saving France from democracy, all the grand butchers of Europe's wars leading their pedestrians to slaughter. There is a social Grand Canyon between these horsemen and the muddy manure-spattered European cowherd whom no one would dream of emulating. Still, the nearest thing I ever saw to the Wild West on either side of the Atlantic was a farm boy in the upper Marne valley. He was driving the herd home and riding the last cow, holding her between his thighs, riding bareback, no reins, no hands. I was with my dear friend, the photographer, I wanted her to get a picture, but the light was falling fast, faster than we could cycle over to the pasture. The cowboy was cooperative; he rode his cow almost into the ground, but the exposure meter said no and we had no flash. It was just as well, that cow would have jumped over the moon with the boy on her back if we had focused lightning on her from the big black round eye that always sends the cows cowering. The cowboy told us he could ride only one cow in the herd, the others weren't used to him. He would be glad to ride a cow any time for the photographer if she came back to take his picture. He told her this in all sincerity, his eyes looking at her haunches the way he must have sized up the cow's before he took his flying leap to mount them for the journey home.
He was the king of that pasture of his, he stood over us on our bicycles, he commanded power just as the farmers do on their wagons hitched behind the heaving buttocks of a Percheron on the roads of Brittany. There are not many left, but it is a fine sight to see such a rig plodding along, the big horse in front, the man standing behind and, on the wagon bed, a calm German shepherd dog. Horses survive here and there on French farms. In 1970, I saw an elderly couple hitching theirs to a buggy outside the church in Honfleur after the market had closed. They only had three miles to go from their farm to the market; the children used to drive the truck to town but now they were grown and gone. The parents were too old to drive, so they let the horse drive.
None of this interests the Parisian. His origins were in the provinces, he or his parents spent years losing their accents, changing their manners, forming and conforming. The cowherd is not his folk hero. When he drives a car, he does not identify with the peasant. He becomes a military man on horseback, he must swoop to Moscow, he is invincible at Austerlitz. Bottle him up in a traffic jam on Elba and he rides up from Cannes, rallying the country to his banner, averaging a hundred thirty-eight kilometers an hour all the way to Waterloo. The infantry is expendable, a whiff of grapeshot is all that is needed to scatter the mob, the unmounted rabble. He does not clean and water his horse; that is for the groom, the hostler, the mechanic, the rabble on foot. He has the double prestige of the horse and the carriage (in French, voiture, the same word whether the vehicle is driven by two horses or four cylinders) grants him isolation.
He does not come into contact with the street, his sedan shields him as the sedan chair once did. What is occurring in the city reaches him only through glass. Anything between his point of departure and his point of arrival is an obstacle that should be cleared from his path. Since one of the characteristics of an automobile is an infinite choice of itineraries, one man's goal must necessarily be another man's obstacle. The consequence is that great swatches of city and countryside are flattened. The tall plane trees that made travel in France a journey through a bower were removed from main roads because drivers kept running into them at eighty miles an hour. Instead of a speed limit, a tree limit was adopted. That ended a delightful transition era of motoring when the car had not yet murdered all that it touched. I admit, there was an exhilaration about coming out of a mile of hot yellow wheat in August, then diving into the plane trees, the shade bathing the road between the trunks, the cool air massaging your face through the open windows. The early age of driving is like the early age of smoking; the pleasure is keen, one can do anything, one becomes hooked and so hopelessly that one cannot stop when the side effects start to catch up.
I keep on talking about France because, in a way, this country has offered me the same living laboratory that the Veterans Administration hospital provided the scientists studying the relationship between smoking and cancer. While it pioneered the automobile, it did not experience the mass car during the Twenties and Thirties. It lay somewhere between the United States of the Tin Lizzy and the Soviet Union where film audiences gaped at The Grapes of Wrath, not because the poor Arkies and Okies were forced to move, but because they were able to move in cars. When I first came to France in 1944 and landed in Normandy, American jeeps and trucks were the only motor vehicles around except for a few cars that had been rerequisitioned by the Resistance after they had been liberated from the Gestapo. They ran on gas generated by burning wood in a big furnace carried outboard on a fender. We came with our militarized traffic jams and the French watched us in amazement.
When I returned in 1948, only surplus jeeps and trucks were left and French cars were so rare that they could be bought new only by paying for them in dollars which were even more rare (this was a LONG time ago). Paris was a city that could be taken in from a sidewalk café or from those rolling sidewalk cafés, the open platform buses that snorted through streets empty except for periodic demonstrations when Communists would pick up the street and throw it at the police in bits and pieces. The open platform buses are gone and it is too bad, they provided an interesting solution to the problem of serving territory between stops on a bus line. Parisians were athletic in those days, they caught their buses on the run, the crowd leaning over the platform and cheering them on, helping hands reaching out to bring the racing passenger into the fold. Or they got off in between gear changes while the conductor grumbled, "Ce n'est pas l'arrêt," and turned his head. There are no more conductors, there are no more open platforms, the buses are hermetically sealed even between stops when they are stopped which is most of the time.
Parisians look back on this period with little nostalgia. They did not have to diet because they were rationed. They did not have to exercise because they ran for buses or cycled out to Nogent-sur-Marne on a Sunday, Monsieur and Madame on a tandem, the baby behind in a trailer. Cars were a curiosity, most of them had been up on blocks during the war and they appeared in public as gingerly as their proprietors, who preferred to gloss over what they had been doing during the war. It was considered bad form to have a new car unless one was American and in those days in in Paris it was not considered bad form to be an American. The breed was encouraged; not only could they buy cars but they were given liberal gasoline rations to run them. The French had no rations at all, but they ran their cars just the same. Any Frenchman who had an American for a friend didn't need an oilwell.
Overnight parking was forbidden. This is probably the most effective way to keep the population of cars and lovers down in a city; a car for every garage, a garage for every car. But it was no way to sell cars. In no time at all, the overnight parking ban came off and the great race was on to keep Paris ahead of the automobile. Streets were widened, acres of sidewalk were whittled down to slats in order to gain two traffic lanes up to the next bottleneck where more trees had to come down and more curbs were forced to retreat. Or the sidewalks themselves were converted into parking lots, officially as on Avenue des Champs-Elysées, unofficially as on every other avenue.
The car become a religion in Paris, perhaps more so than anywhere else. The Parisians have the lowest standards of housing and the highest proportion of car ownership of any Western European city in their league. The old class lines that had blurred somewhat in the immediate postwar confusion were being etched in again... and the easiest way to get across a line was to drive across. Every Parisian could be a man on horseback, every man had the power to crush the infantry that got in his way. The tin armor of body panels and the visor of the windshield came between the Parisian and the city streets from whence he himself had sprung not so long ago. He was not sure of the title to his new nobility, he had to keep asserting it all the time. Just as the converted Jew is supposed to be the worst of anti-Semites, the postwar Parisian with a new car was merciless with the pedestrians who reminded him of his humble condition of only yesterday. He was hardly less harsh on his peers, the drivers who had the effrontery to get in the way of his daily trip to gloire and grandeur. The car became his identity, so much so that the French post office adopted the license-number code to designate postal address zones. A Parisian does not get his mail addressed to the Seine departément any more, the envelope just says "-75-." The Breton in Lanloup is 22, the number that cars from the Côtes-du-Nord departément carry. What more identification could you have with the car; these people live in their license plates.
The old European drive for living space has been sublimated into a push for parking space. The Parisians are becoming bolder. In 1939, they said they weren't going to die for Danzig, today they die for a place to park, screaming and fistfighting and kicking until one of the two adversaries is felled by his infarctus. Etiquette as rigid as the protocol at the court of Versailles governs these encounters on the streets of Paris. For refusing to grant the right of way, one is accused of being a homosexual's mistress. For taking the right of way, one is accused of being a female private part (the mail private part is not used pejoratively in France as it is in English-speaking countries, a difference that could probably generate some fruitful psychoanalytical research). Using English on a Parisian driver is as unpardonable as trying to take the right of way on a bicycle. I do both. In extreme cases, I used to spit on cars but I stopped doing that the day a Ford Capri spun around in a U-turn and headed straight at me. Then I knew how an antelope feels when it is hunted by a sportsman with a high-powered rifle in a low-flying plane. I also bang on roofs. This is pretty effective because, in most French cars, the driver already feels that he is riding around in a beer can and he expects the whole thing to collapse around his head at any minute.
New York muggers are far less dangerous than middle upper-class Parisians. In my own experience, I have found the streets of Paris to be much more reassuring during a riot when traffic is blocked than they are when domestic tranquility reigns and traffic keeps moving. Moving? Flying... strafing, roaring through the gears, tires scorching as the green light drops the starter's checkered flag at Le Mans, through the gears up to fifty in a yellow-orange Renault R-8 (the same as the standard model except that it has four headlights in front and a big amplifier in back in the motor compartment, that's where they keep the cartidges---a flick of the finger and the driver can change the tape so that his engine stops snarling like a Jaguar and starts purring like a Ferrari... or he can shut it off so that it sounds like a Rolls Royce). And so one goes through the gears and through life in Paris where the sidewalks are safe and the streets are lethal.
A really big traffic jam is a lifesaver. Such jams occur whenever more than ten percent of the drivers in Paris decide to use their cars at the same time. A Métro strike provides such an occasion, a three-day weekend another. The biggest jam, the jam with thirty-two flavors, the time that the streets of Paris were paved with solid steel, rubber, and evil intentions, came in June 1968, when the great gasoline strike was broken by General de Gaulle so as to put an end to the "events" of May. He used light mobile units against striking tank trucks as he was never able to use them against striking German tanks in 1940.
With the police guarding the garages---I don't know whether they were gendarmes, Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, officiers de la paix, gardes champêtres, Sureté Nationale (France has as many varieties of cops as it has varieties of cheese, hence the expression: "Fromage it, the gendarmes!")---the gasoline trucks got out to the thirsty pumps of Paris, long drained by longs lines of Parisian drivers who had filled tanks, wine bottles, jerry cans, and bathtubs (for many, it was the first time they had used the bathtubs that came with the apartment they bought to have a fashionable address) in expectation of la révolution, l'occupation, la collaboration, and la liberation. As soon as the gasoline trucks began to roll, nothing else did. The trucks moved through town like freight trains with a long clanking of cars behind them. As soon as the tank truck began to pump gas into a service station, the cars began to take it out, filling up so that they would be able to get on the tail of another tank truck.
The ensuing jam lasted forever. Not only did some women have babies in stalled cars, but others had the time both to conceived their kids and deliver them. They never saw the fathers again after the jam was finally cleared, I don't know how, probably by lumberjacks flown in from le Québec, who worked the frozen rivers of steel from the tops of the cars with their peaveys, prying loose a Peugeot, tilting a Simca, logrolling a Cook's bus just for kicks.
To get away from all this, the Parisian acquires a country home or, to put it properly, he takes his city home to the country on weekends. In a way, this is worse than American suburban sprawl because it is more wasteful. The American has only one house and garden, the Parisian has his city apartment and then, leaping over the outer scab of high-rise suburbs, he has his residence secondaire. There is supposedly one such residence in France for every thirty-two persons, compared to one in seventy-seven for the United States. The poor French farmer gets it both ways: the Parisian rigs the wheel so that the farmer is driven off the land into a job in the big city, then the Parisian moves out onto his far. The barn becomes a duplex studio---living room, mullioned windows replace frank open panes, a big hole is torn out of the once-generous earth to plant an oil tank, the outhouse vanishes because it does not go with an in-house. Monsieur mows the lawn or, on rainy days, figures how much value his property has acquired since last Sunday. Madame gets fresh air and oxygen by driving down to the Hôtel du Coq d'Or in the village, where they have roasted her chicken for lunch.
The French themselves are worried. A report by the National Institute for Demographic Studies states: "As France has the privilege of having the most cars in Western Europe with the least amount of use per individual auto, we are about to have the greatest proportion of country homes at the same time as the highest overcrowding rate in our primary housing." Paris can also boast of the lowest ration of parks to people of any comparable big city. The Parisians who matter have their private parks sixty miles away; a six-lane chunk is torn from a public park like the Bois de Boulogne to help them get there.
Parisians without country houses, according to legend, spend their weekends driving around on the outer boulevards, circling the city until late Sunday, an acceptable time to return home and open the shutters while the neighbors look on. Then there are those who cannot even afford an apartment with a good address in Paris, let alone a country house. They are in a predicament, le standing does not allow them to live in a dormitory suburb, le budget bars them from the big city. Thanks to the car, they have been able to get out of the city and stay in it. It is the car that has made Parly II possible.
Never heard of Parly II? Just mention the word when you hear a supercilious Parisian lecturing about the desert of American taste, the Sahara of our savoir-vivre, the Gobi of our billboards and our shopping centers. Say the magic words: "Parly II" and he will fall silent, probably for the first time in his life. Every day and in every way, Parly II is strengthening its claim to the title of the most retched place in Europe.
The name alone shames all rivals. When its creator first had the idea of putting up blocks of identical flats in the country---one design infinitely reproduced right out of the cookie cutter but the architect's fee is 8 percent so all he has to do is sit back and make sure nothing happens to his right hand that might prevent him from cashing checks---when le promoteur, as the real-estate shark, the barracuda of the building game is known in Paris, decided to get decay out of the city by moving it into a forest, he wanted to call his project Paris II.
It was a Eureka moment, that one, in the history of the earth-blight game. In his fertile brain, he saw concrete piling up alongside streets bearing the names of the most sought-after addresses in Paris. The mark would be able to move in and Madame Mark could get her stationery printed up: "The Marks, 1 Rue de la Paix, Paris II." No, better made that paris ii, get it down to agate, small enough so that it won't be noticed by anyone except the postman.
Like all other great ideas in France, this one went unappreciated. It was killed by small men of small vision. The Paris Municipal Council raised bloody hell, spurred no doubt by constituents living in places like 1 Rue de la Paix, Paris I. It was Verdun all over again. Nothing was sacred---burgundy grown in California, champagne in New York State, cognac in Armedia, the Americans had even stolen la guerre d'Indochine, and now someone was trying to make off with the good name of the capital itself. Paris had not raised that much hell since the Trojan Wars. It got its way, it liberated itself without the help of Hemingway. Paris became an appellation contrôlée, no other city in France had the right to use the name, it was proprietary, like Coke.
Since Paris II needed another hook for the sucker bait, it became Parly II. This combined the original name and that of nearby Marly-le-Roi, a town too feeble to protest, for it was still suffering from the amputation of SHAPE headquarters, the last square millimeter of French soil to be freed from foreign despoilers. Marly was also freed from a couple of thousand well-off families, thereby turning it into a disaster area for landlords and shopkeepers. It was too weak to defend its name. Settlers at Parly II could now answer the embarrassing question of what the name of the place had been before it was Parly II. The whole matter has been resolved and will probably stay that way until Paris decides to get a new image, to lure the exiles back by changing its name to Parly I.
One day, I wheeled into Parly II shortly before high noon on my piebald Peugeot bike. I climbed down from the saddle and looked for a place to hitch the bike. Not a post in sight, just a spiral ramp that led into the parking lot under the shopping center at Parly II, the biggest in all Europe. So I took the bike into the shopping center, one of the boys from the Big Bend country, afraid to go out in the city without his rose for company. The bike wheeled obediently with nothing more than a loose hand on its saddle to guide it. I saw no one else walking bikes through the shopping center but it couldn't have harmed the marble floor any more than a shopping cart or a baby carriage.
On I walked, my head aswim. Musaque, I guess that is what they called it in Parlysian, poured out of hidden speakers. It was an air terminal all over again without the airplanes. This was true progress, far ahead of the laggard Americans who build suburban shopping centers with parking lots for cars. Parly II has lashed them to the mast: it has built a parking lot for people, customers by the hundreds, by the thousands, glued out in their concrete flytraps somewhere between Versailles and the Autoroute de 'Ouest, nothing to see but more flytraps, no one to talk to but more trapped flies, nothing to do but shop, shop, shop all week long by themselves, then shop some more on Saturdays with the husbands and the kids.
This was a factory farm for consumers, no more free ranging through street markets, no more pushcarts, no more Mamanet-Papa shops, just the grand concourse of Parly II, the colors, the lights, the fountains, the palace of the new Versailles where every man is a sun king. And no bistros, bars, cafés to speak of, just a little place for cigarettes and newspapers and a few tables, very few. Investments don't get amortized over a round of pastis or vin blanc; at the shopping center in Parly II, they keep 'em walking, there's no time for leisure in the société des loisirs.
There is less than an ocean between us and Parly II. Paris has always pioneered not in industrial innovation but in the invention of such new political forms as centralization, military dictatorship, the reign of terror, and, most recently, videocracy, government by monopoly TV. In the United States, the automobile is now giving us more spatial but less social mobility, a tendency to seek the same homogenizing social zoning that Paris has achieved. IBM doesn't set any precedents when it goes to Westchester, Louis XIV moved his whole operation to Versailles two hundred fifty years before.

Chapter 5
Man the Mechanical Rabbit

I had to come a long way to get to Parly II on that piebald Peugeot PX-10 with its Reynolds steel frame from England and its Campagnolo pedals from Italy (a Paris dealer once bragged to me that nothing was French on his best French racing bike except the clip that held the rider's water bottle). I had come a long way from my old black-wheeled horse with the rubber saddle painted to look like leather and the built-in swerve to starboard every time I let go of the handlebars. It was long gone, sold to a friend's son and stolen thereafter. I was sad to hear of its loss. On it I had ventured to work a dozen years before in my little black ensemble: bicycle, raincoat, briefcase, outlook on life, all matching. That is the start of cyclotherapy, the first timid step, when the bike is just a better way to get to places that one should never go to at all.
Many cyclists in Paris never get beyond that stage. They bike by necessity, not choice; they have left no cars behind them to boost their egos at crossroads confrontations. They cycle religiously to their jobs as bank guards or post office clerks where they can take out their frustrations on the public. They use circle clips to keep their trousers clean and humble, they stop obediently at all traffic lights, they will press no more hardily on their pedals in order to respond to the challenge when you pass them. They are the Lumpenproletariat of traffic, prisoners on the bicycle chain gang.
My old black bicycle immediately placed me in their category. Those were the days before the minibike had been adopted at Saint-Tropez, thereby making it acceptable to miniminds in Paris. People unworthy of notice are never noticed by Parisians, a bicycle rider immediately becomes an invisible prole to most of them. Time and again, I would encounter a colleague and a secretary whiling away a lunch hour on Rue de la Gaîté in Montparnasse, but they looked right through me from behind the windows of his Merc. I let them go their gay way on Rue de la Gaîté (which has nothing to justify its name except for a self-service restaurant with the startling name of Self-Gaîté). I once turned up for work on a holiday and asked a guard for the key to an office, my own. The guard: "What for?" "Why, it's my office." The guard, hesitating, then: "Excuse me, monsieur, I always see you coming in on a bicycle, I thought you were manual." I assured him I was automatic and he gave me the key.
On Saturday afternoons I would roam the city with my son. He was still under fourteen, too young to ride a Velosolex, that combination of bicycle and motorcycle with all the disadvantages of both (the Velosolexist gets as little exercise as the motorist and as little protection as the cyclist). As soon as he became fourteen, I bought him a Solex and I didn't see him for five years. But in those days, we pedaled together through Paris. The city shrank before my eyes; gradually I realized how small its heart really is (the case of any large city where so much of the body is fat). From the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame on a Saturday afternoon with my son used to be a whole Saturday afternoon by car. It turned out to be only twenty minutes by bike. We crossed the Seine over to the Proustian gardens of the Champs-Elysées, then got through the traffic on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré by osmosis until the street lost its air and its Faubourg to become Rue Saint-Honore, bound for Les Halles napping in the afternoon. The markets were open then, now they have been put to sleep forever. From Les Halles, I could tow my son through forgotten alleys until we reached the Pont Neuf and the haven of Île de la Cité. We usually managed to take in the pet shops on the Right Bank---everything from monkeys to dyed chicks at Easter time---then the flower market on the island, before we got to Notre Dame.
By bicycle, that trip can be repeated time and again, it is never the same. I once made it with my niece and, lo and behold, there was a monkey up a tree on the edge of the flower market. Two firemen were up the tree with him, clambering about in their leather boots, shaking branches with a long stick while he clung for dear life until he let go to the gasps of the crowd, only to fall to safety onto a market shed. He could have skipped from shed to shed until the end of his days, but he was too much of a ham. He liked to hear the crowd gasp; he worked his way back to the tree that had become his territory while the firemen went after him again, encouraged by a brigadier who had gone up with them, all the better to survey the operation. My niece was only in Paris for a few weeks; I had trouble convincing her that I had not staged the whole thing as a happening for her benefit. She has grown up in one of the remote reaches of Queens, Long Island, known as Fresh Meadows, where there are no longer any meadows at all, fresh or stale. It is the kind of a place where the only thing that can happen is a happening.
I suppose that was what attracted me to the bicycle right from the start. It is not so much a way of getting somewhere as it is a setting for randomness; it makes every journey an unorganized tour. I remember one of the first days that I used it to go home to lunch. I was cutting down a wide avenue, with a mall in its middle, on market day. The market stalls were on the mall, the market men's trucks were parked diagonally to the curb, cars were backed up impatiently as a truck maneuvered out. I slithered by and got up to the truck. It was in the clear but the driver was talking to another marker, one of those Paris street conversations that drive waiting motorists to frenzy and their horns to crescendo. As I went by, the driver reached out to shake hands with his friend. I grabbed the dangling hand, shook it and went on. "Salut, mon petit," he said.
He, too, must have thought I was manual. In any case, he did not think I belonged to that race of Parisians so hell-bent on doing nothing that they will drive roughshod over anyone who gets in their way while he is engaged in doing something. It is so instructive to pull ahead of a lane of honking gars, mainly occupied by women late for their hairdressers or men late for their women, to weave through and find an Auvergnat unloading coal by the sack or a dairy truck discharging yogurt.
Only once did I escape the ninety-decibel blats of the leisured. I had fallen in with Louis Carao, a bicycle cop in the 6th arrondissement who can handle any situation from a family quarrel to a traffic incident with irreproachable aplomb. He had beaten me in a sprint up the bus lane on Rue de Rennes despite his uniform and his police-issue bicycle and it was good to know that the peace of our neighborhood was in such capable hands and feet. We were riding side by side on Rue Vavin; a file of cars crawled behind us meek as cows, not a peep, not a beep, not a moo, the sight of Louis under his képi left them speechless. We rode and we talked; pedaling stimulates Louis's talking as it does my writing. He is a Breton, I am somewhat in his country when I ride through the farms around Lanloup and greet all the other Bretons who have not yet gone to Paris. They are Celts like the Irish and the Welsh; they belong to that doomed race of poets who have refused to take on the ways of the Franks or the Angles and the Saxons. In Brittany, there are more cyclists than I have seen anywhere else in France. The Parisians might say it is because the Bretons are backward, I see nothing backward about the fine strapping women walking their bikes out of Lanvollon on market day, bread on the handlebars, meat and groceries on the back rack; the bike is a truck, a riding horse converted into a pack mule that has to be led.
It must be cycling that encouraged me to think as I do, to explore any turning that comes up, to take the unmarked roads to their end. That is the liberation that the bicycle can offer. I am more often for folkways than I am for bikeways. The bikeway is a start. It protects motor-man when he goes out for the first time without his tin shell. He feels so vulnerable; he can sense steel crushing his limbs the way it used to crush his fenders. But he should not stay too long on bicycle paths; there is no point in moving from one herd to another. The bicycle, in most places, is the only vehicle that does not carry a license plate. The cyclist has no "75" on his back in Paris, he need never display his social security number in Washington, he is considered so harmless that he is not required to carry insurance. Yet beware, a cyclist can go far. A few years back, a criminal involved in one of the unsuccessful attempts to assassinate de Gaulle managed to escape from his top-security prison on an island off the Channel coast. He got to the mainland; there a dragnet was cast for him. All roads were blocked, all cars were checked, the autoroutes coming into Paris were tied up for miles while police peered into trunks and pried under back seats. They never found their man; only later was it learned that he had reached Belgium by bicycle.
For the bicycle possesses ethereality, it floats along on those gossamer wheels that give themselves away only when they twinkle in the sun. The rider can violate the Heisenberg principle that the presence of the observer must necessarily change the phenomenon observed. The bicycle insinuates itself unseen into the innermost tissue of a large city where there is so, so much life that cannot be sensed through a windshield.
There are times in cities when they seem to emanate a flux. I have sensed it in Tokyo along lanes where cars have never entered, where the only vehicles were the two-wheeled trailers that the icemen towed behind their bicycles, stopping in front of the customer's door to saw off a cake for him. I would walk through festivals outside Shinto temples where the whole neighborhood was dancing to the sound of a drum mounted on a big wooden platform overhead, the drummer dancing as he swatted it. The bicycle had already taught me in Paris and New York that nothing could hurt me in places like this. I would venture into them for hours on end, never seeing a white face, thinking I had become yellow myself.
In Paris I once had the same feeling on an autumn afternoon near the Dugommier Métro station where an old man was running a merry-go-round. I had spotted him a few days before as I cruised by on my way to ride along the banks of the Marne. He had come with a wooden truck and trailer painted ever so long ago a robin's-egg blue. The truck went back to the war, the Great War, as the English call it, the days of 1914. The next time I rode by, the trailer had disappeared, its strange semi-circular sides had become the base of the merry-go-round, the little ride was all set up. Children in the neighborhood were sitting on Mickey Mouse or turning the wheel of a speedboat or honking the horn of a runabout while the merry-go-round spun round under the eyes of the old man, his skin bronzed by a lifetime outdoors on Place Dugommier or Boulevard de Belleville. There was a little park across the street on Rue de Charenton, the sun came slanting through the trees in the park, the merry-go-round and the park were one, held together by the sunbeams.
I talked to the old man and so did my friend the photographer. She was from the country around Tours in the valley of the Loire. He knew her country, he had played Touraine with his great airplane ride in 1912. He gave us his address and, on another day, we rode out there. He lived in Montrouge, a suburb on the southern border of Paris, one of the old suburbs where the country laps on the edge of the city, small houses and yards with chickens pecking in the dust and rabbits quietly fattening in their cages seven minutes by bicycle from Montparnasse. We recognized his place at once. The wood fence outside was the faded robin's-egg blue of the old Berliet truck, inside he lived in one of those circus trailers, a house on wheels. He was surrounded by all the trailers he had used in his life, they rusted and peeled as they grew old with him. He was well into his seventies, his hands trembled, but they could crank up the old chain-drive Berliet and put the Mickey Mouse figures into place on the merry-go-round. He was a stout house built long ago and still standing. When I returned to the trailer later to give him prints of the pictures we had taken, his daughter was there. She came once a week to clean the place. She told me her father had been a very strong man, she had seen him pick up an automobile and move it by himself.
His merry-go-round comes and goes on Place Dugommier when I ride by, it is part of the circuit that both of us ride through the forgotten quarters of Paris. I had lived twenty years in the city without ever seeing Place Dugommier and the merry-go-round. Inside a car in a city, your eyes are on the level of the garbage cans, they can see nothing else. Place Dugommier lies on Rue de Charenton, precisely the sort of street that the shrewd driver avoids. Rue de Charenton is clogged from early morning, when the garbage trucks come by with their tail of crawling cars, through the rest of the day as the furniture trucks load. It is one of the main streets of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a part of Paris reputed for manufacturing dining-room sets and revolutions. Just off Rue de Charenton lies what must be the best market in Paris now that Les Halles are gone. Every day except Monday on Rue D'Aligre and Place d'Aligre, the pushcarts and the stands come out, their proprietors evenly divided between Algerian Arabs and former European settlers from Algeria, living together here with their shared memories. On Place d'Aligre, there is a café-tabac which, since it sells alcohol and cigarettes, is naturally the headquarters of the local sports club. I often come there for coffee in the morning, early in the morning when the cafés in Montparnasse are still asleep behind their barricades of chairs upended on tables. On Place d'Aligre, the market men and women arrive early; some breakfast on steaks, others on white wine. The café-tabac is open on Mondays as well, but then I have it almost to myself, sharing it with hand-truck drivers keeping their tanks topped up with wine. I never see Parlysian Parisians on Place d'Aligre and seldom on Rue de Charenton. They are too busy driving to their offices where they can work eleven months a year and dream of a month of picturesque living in a Club Mediterranée village only a few jet hours away on the shores of Morocco where there is an Arab quarter outside the well-guarded gate. They can see the Arabs, but the Arabs can't see them. The Club knows who its customers are. Every year when the weather gets hot and the traffic starts to stench in Paris, the big green city buses blossom out with signs on their rear ends: "Ah, if only you were with the Club Mediterranée..." Perhaps the Club pays the bus driver to squirt a little more diesel smoke when he carries the ad? It can be seen best from a following car. Pedestrians never look at it; on a bike, you never stay behind the bus long enough to get the message.
The bike in the city is ubiquitous. At one moment it can be on Place d'Aligre, at the next it can be on the Longchamp circuit in the Bois de Boulogne where the racers meet. That is also the meeting place of the same sort of semicyclist that one finds in Central Park in New York. He must take his racing bike to a bike path by car, he is afraid that he might be taken for carless if he did not. Yet Longchamp has its charms. You start riding until you catch someone or someone catches you. That does not take too long; the circuit is about two miles long around the outer fence of the Longchamp racetrack. You take turns slipstreaming, each of you pushing along at top speed, until you catch up with someone. Then the two cyclists become a trio, the trio becomes a quartet and und so weiter until all the riders on the Longchamp circuit have been gathered up into a big flashing flock, their stockinged legs, blue, red, green, pumping up and down, up and down, like pistons; their feet attached to the pedals so that their ankles work like bearings, the big wheels with the chrome spokes winking at the sun, sending motes over blue, green, red stockings. It is almost impossible to shake off a cyclist once he's in your wake; you fight the wind, he just goes along for the ride.
There is one little fellow at Longchamp who can leave me behind. He uses a liniment to warm up his thigh muscles and it lays a barrage of reek right behind his rear wheel. No one can get near him; he rushes around Longchamp at the head of the flock, invincible in his liniment. We can only pick him up on the backstretch where the wind turns; now it buoys us along, we whir at twenty-five miles per hour as if we were sitting in our living rooms; the air is still, the Flying Skunk loses most of his advantage, we can put him behind.
But if there is no wind, then I usually let him have Longchamp all to himself. I spin out at the Porte de Boulogne, I fight the nonorganic exhaust stink on Saint-Cloud bridge leading to the Autoroute de l'Ouest and, from there, I head straight up into the Parc de Saint-Cloud, one of the handsome vestiges of the royal forests that used to stretch from Paris to Versailles and beyond. The Parc de Saint-Cloud is certainly the quietest, wildest, and yet the most beautiful park on the western end of Paris (a situation that is to be remedied by cutting a new freeway through an area where only the squirrels can protest).
It is a favorite haunt of Parisian drivers and their dogs. Many automobilistes tend to travel with gigantic mastiffs in the car, a fashion probably set by women cab drivers. These beasts glare at you from the back seat; one deterred me from passing his master in a tight spot because he had all his fangs bared, waiting to tear a piece out of an unwary cyclist just as the shark keeps an eye out for the passing scuba diver. When the car stops, the Parisian leaves his dog inside. He does not believe in such Anglo-Saxon nonsense as being kind to animals unless his girl friend happens to be wearing some. Thanks to man's best friend, the parked car can be noisier in Paris than the moving car when a pent-up dog begins to growl, then to howl. He wakes up the neighborhood, he's as bad as a stuck horn but with a difference: the stuck horn won't take your finger off if you try to fix it. The poor dog yowls inside the car until his master drives him off to a restaurant where he can then howl, growl, and yowl from under the table at all the other hungry dogs in the establishment. In a Parisian restaurant, dogs go hungry, there are no doggy bags, the lords and masters wolf all the food, there are no leftovers. Some Parisian dog lovers, appalled at the Biafra-like misery at their feet, have trained their animals to snap up Camembert rinds. Restaurants have a way of getting quieter about the time of the cheese course.
To keep his dog in trim, the Parisian takes him to the Parc de Saint-Cloud. He doesn't walk him, he drives him. I witnessed the process one Sunday morning in the parc. On a pleasant stretch where a one-lane road climbs through birch woods, I was tooted and passed by a little red Fiat station wagon. Behind the little red Fiat bounded a little white fox terrier. He passed me, too; I labored up the hill after shifting down about seven or eight speeds. I thought I could catch him once I began to run downhill. I wheezed over the summit, fiddled with the gearshift levers and soon I was helling downhill on my private asphalt ski run, bent way over the handlebars to cut the wind resistance. When I really want to go fast, I bow my head. I don't know if this streamlines me, but I don't get the wind in my eyes and so I think I'm fighting it less. A friend of mine who used to do some amateur racing can get his head down so far that his backside is higher than his neck, giving him that egg shape so sought after by schussers. I'm too tall and stiff, I can't get any closer than a scrambled egg. At any rate, I egged myself on down the hill, down I tore, not a sign of the Fiat through the bare birches on that winter Sunday. I leaned into a curve to take it without braking. That's the most fearsome part of running downhill. If you lean far enough, you can go around anything, but your whole body screams that it doesn't want to lean. You must sneak up on it, tip it by surprise, don't watch the outer edge of the asphalt or you'll break up.
The road came out of the birches into a clearing. The little red Fiat was parked on the shoulder, a little blue man in a blue track suit was getting out to jog, the little white fox terrier was standing next to a log, not even breathing hard. As I went by, he cocked a leg up to show what he thought of his competition.
I coasted to the bottom of the hill, I started to climb again. Once more a toot, a deeper note, a big gray Citroën with a hound of some sort loping behind it like a footman behind a royal coach. This time, the driver took the whole circuit and I caught him just at the bottom of the hill where he had opened the lid of the trunk to put the dog back in.
I stopped, smiled, and said: "Don't you think you need the exercise as much as your chien does?"
He stopped, smiled, and said: "But, monsieur, I am now going off to jog five kilometers at the Racing Club. And this is a chienne." He didn't have to tell me, any fool could have seen that, just looking at the dog. I smiled, and said: "I know, monsieur, but I am an American and I always mix my genders in French." That excused everything; he confided to me with pride in English that his bitch could keep up twenty-five kilometers an hour for nearly five kilometers. I congratulation him, I petted the dog, and I cycled off humbled. You must hand it to the Parisians, they've found a way for man to replace the mechanical rabbit. Such are the discoveries that are needed in our time if we are to give people something to do in between vacations.
In my cycling through Central Park in New York, I have never met anyone pacing a small dog with a large car. The trails of the park near 59th Street are not recommended for cycling in the early morning. They are filled by people walking dogs, big dogs; you have the impression that somebody opened the cages in the zoo. These dogs are as useful to the Manhattan city dweller as their ancestors were to the caveman. Big and fierce enough to stop a young urban riot on the strength of their appearance alone, they allow their owners to feel perfectly safe walking in Central Park. Such dogs, of course, must be walked in Central Park if they are to keep in the kind of shape required to awe the indigenous fauna. This keeps their masters in shape; here we find man and animal living harmoniously, like the pilot fish and the shark, the little bird that likes rhinoceroses, the dog and the flea.
I quickly became discouraged while riding through this menagerie in Central Park, the dogs sizing me up, the masters tugging back at the reins as if they were trying to stop runaway horses. Only once has anyone ever looked at me in Paris the way those dogs scrutinized me in New York. With my bicycle, I had wandered into the meat shed at Les Halles, just for the sake of wandering. I liked the sight of those clean white and red carcasses on their hooks in long straight ranks, looking like soldiers standing formation except that they are already dead. As I stopped at the head of a row to take it all in, a wholesaler looked at me. He was one of those men with small eyes and big bellies native to the meat shed at Les Halles. He looked me in the eye, he looked at my feet, and, suddenly, I had the feeling that he was calculating how much I would fetch, skinned and dressed. Not very much; he soon turned away.
In New York, too, I prowl the city in the early hours. Before the cars are out, there is not that much difference between Paris and New York. There is the same rich core only a few minutes in diameter by bicycle. From Herald Square to the Battery is only twenty minutes and at least five different cultures: Big Town, Chinatown, Little Italy, Spanishtown on 14th Street, Georgetown over the West Village.
I would start a trip to the Battery at five in the morning. I would rise stealthily and, without awakening my mother in whose Park Avenue apartment I was staying, I would take my bicycle from her seventh-floor balcony and go out the door. I had been told by all concerned, superintendent, doormen, elevator men (it's one of those Manhattan buildings, all it lacks is a drawbridge and a password) that I would be foolhardy to leave the bike in the cellar or the lobby. So I took it upstairs every night, the way people used to do in Paris during the Occupation. Around dinnertime, there would usually be people in the elevator and the bike made a fine conversation piece, especially if there were four or five other passengers and I had to stand it on its back wheel to make room for them. While the back wheel of the bike fraternized with their dogs, I would chat with the owners.
"That sure beats the traffic, doesn't it?"
"It sure does."
"Oh, I get off here, 'night."
" 'Night."
The quality of the night elevator man's conversation was much higher. He puzzled me, the way he used words accurately, almost artificially. Early the next morning, when I came down with the bike, I happened to mention to him that I had a better bike in France where I lived.
"Oh, you live in France? I'm French."
"You're French?"
"Yes, my name is John Martin... Jean Martin."
We slipped into French. He explained to me he had no intention of going back to France. He was earning over a hundred dollars a week as a liftier de nuit, his wife was earning the same. They had been able to go on spending like Frenchmen while earning like Americans, la vie was belle. Jean-John Martin didn't mind running an elevator up and down as long as he didn't have to run around in circles. He was a contented man.
"You know what Merleau-Ponty told Sarte at the Café des Deux Magots, don't you?" Monsieur Martin asked me. I remembered vaguely that Merleau-Ponty had played high priest to Sartre's pope when existentialism flowered in Saint-Germain-of-the-Meadows. Sartre was and still is the leader of the Left Bank, the militant minks, the starving intellectuals (no potatoes, no bread, no starches, no sauces, no fats, just beautiful bones), the last-ditch fighters against Yankee imperialism who boldly snap their fingers at decadent plutocratic racist Uncle Sam by driving Lancias and BMWs instead of Chevrolets of Mustangs.
I didn't know what Merleau-Ponty told Sartre at the Café des Deux Magots... unless he was trying to get him to pick up the check. I shook my head as we reached the ground floor and started to wheel my bike out through the lobby.
"He said: 'Do you know what I'll do if the Communists ever take over in France?'
"Sartre said: 'No, what will you do?'
"And Merleau-Ponty said: 'I'll go to New York and become an elevator man.' "
Monsieur Martin looked around expansively at the building lobby, the engravings of old Murray Hill, the carpet, not a soul in sight, the world dark and empty outside the plate-glass doors.
"Eh bien, me voilà!"
I left him in his air-conditioned reverie and headed south along Fifth Avenue at half past five in the morning. A very safe time to be in the streets of New York, the traffic isn't out and the muggers are all in. Cycling is pleasant, you need only keep a weather eye out for the privately owned garbage trucks that rumble and race through the streets with their cargoes of expensive aromas from the restaurants of lower Manhattan. They are big bruising hulking vehicles with the bulk of a tank and the acceleration of a Honda. I gave them plenty of room as they made their U-turns to go the wrong way down one-way streets.
South I rode along Fifth Avenue, then onto Broadway where the twain met. The streets got into the low numbers. I didn't have to worry about directions, I let Broadway find the way. I just kept my head down, not for speed but for safety. My eyes were glued to the surface; there are holes in the streets of New York, holes the like of which I have never seen elsewhere. They could swallow up a small Citroën, they would not even make a tidbit of a large bicycle. In the United States, country roads are smooth and manicured, the cities are full of holes. In France, it is Paris that enjoys hand-paved streets while the peasants bounce along the ruts and crevasses that break out on all roads except those where tolls are charged. In New York, too, there are gratings over sewers where the gap between the bars is narrow enough to let a bus go over them safely, but easily wide enough to gulp the front wheel of a bike. All the hazards of New York are on such a scale.
At Union Square, there was an island of slight activity, bums stirring on the benches, a jogger or two stamping around the park. Then back to the dark again, the numbers on the streets changing to names, down through the incredible no man's land between Lower Fifth Avenue and Lower Manhattan---seedy sleazy lofts, blocks and blocks, the world's crummiest structures next to the world's most expensive real estate, discount houses and Army and Navy stores, the Peaceful Army and Navy Store.
From the Empire State Building to the Battery is a quick run at half past five in the morning or at any time of the day. Infiltrating traffic is easy in New York; in Paris you must keep an alert eye for the door that suddenly opens in your face. Sometimes it is attached to the high cab of a truck at the level of your neck and calculated to leave you rolling down to the next traffic light, a headless torso, blood spouting from the stump in a neat many-streamed fountain.
Americans never open their car doors in New York. They go through the city locked into their Apollo spaceships, air conditioners turned on to preserve the temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and political opinions of Westchester, air conditioners leaving a searing wake of heat behind their cars like the exhaust from a Saturn booster; dark glass on their windshields to protect them from looking the facts of urban life straight in the eye.
At the Battery that morning, I rode up to the car lane of the Staten Island Ferry. The black man in the ticket window gave me change for a dollar, all in nickels. When I asked him when the next boat would leave, he told me to look at the schedule posted outside.
I knew it would happen, New York had been invaded by the Parisians.
I rode to the head of the car lanes as I always do, there's never a wait for the cyclist at the Staten Island Ferry. That morning, only two trucks were on line, their drivers asleep over their wheels. A ferry was in and unloading. A minute later, the gates were open and I slipped aboard, riding through the tunnel of the empty car hold until I reached the bow. There, I locked the bike to a stanchion. At one time, I thought the Staten Island Ferry was the only place in New York where you could leave a bike unlocked with a fair chance of finding it when you came back, but a deck hand disagreed. "Better chain that thing up, one of those juiceheads might come along and throw it overboard."
I went topside and, at the food stand, I took a large orange juice in a paper cup and went out on deck. There, standing at the rail, I toasted the rising sun, the towers of Manhattan, the Verrazano Bridge, the Con Ed smokestack that was just sneaking out its first oily layers of blackish smoke to flatten against the hot sky when no one was awake to look. I toasted Governor's Island, Ellis Island, a tugboat named Moran, a railroad-car ferry, the Statue of Liberty. I got to feeling possessive about that ferry. I used to take it almost every morning when I was in New York for a short visit. A little later on another morning, I was drinking my orange juice next to a little boy. I breathed the air of New York Bay, not too deeply because the wind was coming from New Jersey. I turned to him and I said: "You know, this is my yacht."
The wheels began to click in his head. He looked out at the water, he looked back at Manhattan on fire in the sun, his eyes caught the Statue of Liberty, then he turned to me and he said: "It's mine, too."
He was a lot smarter than another kid about the same age who was making the trip with his daddy. This little boy noticed a long spar that might have been a flagpole except that it happened to be jutting out at a forty-five-degree angle from the base of the pilothouse.
His father, an Irishman, squinted up and produced an immediate answer: "Oh, that's their harpoon. They carry it just in case they see a whale in the bay."
I wasn't as dumb as that kid. When the ferry was pulling in, I asked the first mate what was that big stick up there. He said it was a steering staff: since a ferry has no bow, somebody had to put a fixed point in front of the pilot so he could line his ship up on where he was going.
Ferryboats are conducive to conversation if the ride lasts long enough, as it does on New York Boy. On still another occasion, I was standing up forward with my bike. A young man had just gotten out of his car, a red Opel. He was unhappy because he had missed the previous boat; they hadn't held it for him and now he was going to be late for his job driving a big semi-trailer for the U.S. Post Office up on 33rd Street.
He didn't mind the job, but the pay wasn't too good, he couldn't afford more than an Opel. He had already passed the examination for the Department of Sanitation and he was waiting for the first opening so that he could make the change. It wasn't as bad as it looked, he explained. On a garbage truck, there are three men, all drivers. Each one takes his turn driving every third day. The other two days, he rides along on the back.
"It's a Civil Service job, just like the Post Office, but you can go out on strike. And it pays way over ten thousand a year." A pause. "The only trouble is, two days out of three, you've got to handle that garbage."

Chapter 6
The Eye of the Cycle

The world lies right beyond the handlebars of any bicycle that I happen to be on anywhere from New York Bay to the Vallée de Chevreuse. Anywhere is high adventure, the walls come down, the cyclist is a loner, it is the only way for him to meet other loners. And it works. One seldom exchanges anything but curses or names of insurance companies with another driver, the car inhibits human contacts. The bicycle generates them; bikes talk to each other like dogs, they wag their wheels and tinkle their bells, the riders let their mounts mingle. On the road, you can join any club of cyclists in France, there is no membership fee. Stay with them on the hills and take your turn up front upwind, that's all the initiation ceremony there is.
It is wise to avoid racers. The best company is a mixed bag of all ages, youngsters for sprints, the fifties and even the sixties for endurance. I know one such group that meets at nine o'clock every Sunday morning at the Montrouge town hall just beyond Porte de Châtillon on the south side of Paris. Like so many hundreds of others on Sunday morning, they head out into the Chavreuse Valley, the closes countryside to the city. It has everything on a cycle scale: hills, plateaus, woods, plains, rivers, villages, steeples. If you want to see the Chevreuse Valley from a bicycle seat, just turn up at the Montrouge town hall and follow the crowd past Châtenay-Malabry where a statue of Voltaire smiles down on you, across Route 186 throwing its girdle of steel and smog around the outer suburbs of Paris, through the greenhouses and the orchards of Verrières le Buisson and then into the Chevreuse Valley.
Montrouge rolls winter and summer, rain or shine. On the Sunday that I joined them, the weather was cold and dry in Paris but, as soon as we got beyond Verrières, the roads ran wet with drainage from farms. The back wheel of my racing bike, stripped of its mudguard to gain an extra few ounces, was picking water from the road and, with every turn, sending it up my back, from fundament to the nape of my neck, a wet muddy swath along my spine. I looked as if I had been sitting on one of those superbidets used in Spain and Portugal according the the saw that the more Catholic the country, the stronger the sitz-plumbing.
At this point, we had reached the state of happy equilibrium that the cyclist achieves in winter when he is soaking wet with sweat, rain, and mud but he has heated the whole mixture to 98.4 degrees F. or so and it lubricates more than anything else. The merry men from Montrouge rolled merrily... until a shot rang out. It was one of our wheelmates blowing a tubular, a boyau, the French call it, the word means gut. You put about seventy pounds of pressure in it; when you blow a gut, you can hear it half a mile off.
We stopped. He unrolled his spare gut kept in a package under his seat. The wind that had been on our heels caught us, it blew through the sweat and the wet, it turned them to chill and slime. Our noses trickled and icicled, our hands froze red and blue as we stretched that tubular, almost tearing a gut, until we got it over the rim. Once it was in place, we helped him blow up his gut. Off we rolled, fifty yards, a hundred yards, we stopped again, the tire was coming off the rim. Tubulars should be cemented, we had no cement. We went through the stretch-and-freeze all over again, the tubular was back on the wheel, but it had to be treated warily. So we started slowly downhill, exerting no effort, building up no heat in our furnaces, while the wind tore at us with renewed glee and our noses ran as wet as the tar beneath our wheels.
It was there that, once again, I felt the barrier of a pane of glass. Automobiles went by, loaded with families sitting motionless in their warmth, huddled inside their wombs. We could have been on the moon and they on the earth, though only two or three feet separated us on the cold road. Our feet moved automatically, instinctively; we could not feel them any longer, they had been stuck out in a freezing mist for a couple of hours with no more protection than the skin-deep leather of cyclists' shoes the weight of ballet slippers and perhaps some newspaper. Round and round our feet churned; we could not have told you if our legs were driving the bicycles or the bicycles were driving the legs. Some of the auto nobility in the passing cars smiled at us, others ignored us the way I had always been taught to ignore cripples, beggars, unshaven men asking directions, staring at them as if they did not exist. On one and the same road, they were going out for Sunday dinner and we were trying to reach the North Pole over the ice floes and through the watery chasms. They would not have believed us if we had told them. They knew that the North Pole had already been discovered; they could not have known that it was just outside their windows in the Chevreuse Valley.
Exploration comes easy on a bicycle, the unknown is everywhere. Once, with the photographer, I was cycling early in the morning over the black flat landscape of the Gatinais country just north of Orléans. We flicked out our lights, we could see better without them and the generators took too much of our strength. A bicycle headlight will only cover ten feet of road; even at fifteen miles an hour, that's not enough. So we used our lights as markers, starting the generators whenever we saw or heard a car, then back to darkness again. Without lights on a strange road, the sensation was almost of flying. We could see ahead, we could not see at our feet. We had to hope no boulders had been strewn in our path, that no New York-sized potholes pocked the way.
It was worth the risk. Villages in Gatinais are few and far between by French standards, one only every five miles or so. We steered from one farmhouse to the next, their lights standing out like those of an island in the sea. That day, I guess, we rounded Cape Horn by bicycle. We got as far as Bishop's Ford Pond, then we came back against the wind, through the Roaring Forties. The sun was up, we could see the houses now; the white sheets drying on the lines bellied like the sails of a square-rigger running downwind; we dipped our heads in salute as we beat our way back to town where housewives were sweeping the sidewalk in front of their doors, dipping their brooms into the water that had been sent coursing through the gutters from a municipal tap. All the women in town were out together at dawn, scrubbing their sidewalks. We tried to photograph them; it was too late by the time we had enough light, the tap had been turned off and the ball was over. We went to a café to breakfast on bread and black tea while the owner's dog leaped all over us. French country dogs are as nice as French country people, they have nothing in common with the yapping poodle or the trembling Mexican hairless native to Paris. The dogs are friendly in the little hotels that the bicycle sniffs out: Au Petit Chalet, Au Moulin Vert, the Relais du Saôsnois, the Hostellerie de la Vallée du Lunain; I keep their cards, occasionally their modest bills, just to remind myself that money isn't everything, that in fact it is nothing, it is a hurdle that makes the pursuit of happiness an obstacle course.
O blessed bicycles, they can scent out the places where I have no business---the pretentious dump on 42nd Street where there is no room to park a bike and the night clerk offers service with a snarl. I spent a night there, the next morning I straddled a bicycle and let it have its head. It took me round the edges of Manhattan, the frayed hem of what used to be the waterfront. Down to South Street, around Battery Park, once Castle Garden and the Aquarium now a beach for bums and others who want to be left alone. No one stares at them there except the binocular telescopes mounted on the rim of the park; their eyepieces eyes, their fittings facial expressions, you can cock them in their swivels to create attitudes for a photographer in the early morning. I rolled past the fireboat pier, pure 1900 Luna Park, past the big bollards where the tugs tie up and wait to taxi harbor pilots out to their ships. The express liners are gone, the great changing skyline of New York's waterfront---the four stacks of the Mauretania and the Aquitania, the grace of the Europa and the Bremen. We once sailed from the Battery on a tug to greet my dad on the Bremen when she lay off in quarantine. I remember the icebox cake on that tug; every time I roll by the Battery I always look into the galleys of the tugs tied up there to see what they are serving.
In 1967, I sailed past the Battery myself on the France outward bound; the Queen Elizabeth was following us a mile astern. Down the Hudson we paraded, no festive occasion, nothing more than an Atlantic crossing you could have got the passenger lists of both ships into a clutch of 747s. Off Sandy Hook, we slowed to drop the pilot. His cutter was waiting out there to pick up the pilots as they finished their runs, it was a trysting place for ships. The France lost way, she lay still, the pilot stepped into his bobbing boat; now the Queen Elizabeth was drawing near, coming up out of the haze. Our pilot was clear, the black smoke poured from the funnels of the France, scouring out the fuel oil that had clogged the pipes in port; she showed her derrière to Queen Elizabeth, Trafalgar was avenged. Now the Queen Elizabeth stopped to drop her pilot at the same spot chalked on the sea by the choreographer; we lost her from sight, we will never see her again, we will only see the phantoms of the city of stacks as we cycle up West Street past the shattered piers, up North River.
A good way up, well out of the desolation zone where the World Trade Center is encroaching on the river, I came across a place that proclaimed itself a motel. It didn't look like a motel, it looked like a scale model of the Flatiron Building, a sailors' rooming house, perhaps, that had somehow survived the departure of the sailors. On one side of its prow lay the piers, on the other a street of wholesale meat markets. I walked in; behind a pane of bulletproof glass, a spry little lady was sitting. I asked her if she had any rooms, and, in a Scottish accent that she had not lost if fifty years, she replied that she had. I could take my bicycle up there, too, for the same price. She apologized---I had to pay in advance. Up at 42nd Street, I had to pay in advance, too, but nobody apologized. That hotel was close to the United Nations, my motel was the United Nations: the manager was Iranian, the day clerk Scottish, the night clerk Filipino; there was good Cuban company among the butchers who took their dawn coffee at a diner a block away, a true diner not ashamed of its trolley-car lineage. The lady serving coffee was heavy and warm; she told of how she used to work uptown near the ships. All the sailors knew the place, they would invite her aboard the Normandie or the Andrea Doria for their Christmas parties in port. It was all gone, she said, the waterfront was a ghost town. I had bought a ticket for New York, I had ended up in Leadville, Colorado. The lady may have known the seamen who sailed my dad across, she may have known Yves, the old oiler on the Île de France who stays gently oiled on weekends at the Duvals' café in Brittany. Once he has got steam up, he tells all Lanloup what life is like in New York. The chickens drop into your hands already roasted from a slot in the wall; nobody buys a newspaper, they stand in the streets and read the news for nothing as it flashes in lights around a building. "Right, monsieur?" he asked me, his follow American. Right, I say, as I head away from the café on my bicycle.
I often start from cafés. The photographer and I know so many cafés in Paris that each must think it is our favorite. The owner of the Escurial on Boulevard Saint-Germain likes to talk to me about cycling as I wait for the photographer. I always park my bike next to his oyster stand, still deserted at six in the morning, so that I can keep an eye on both the bike and the street as I wait.
One morning as I talked to the owner, the photographer arrived, black slacks, black sweater, black parka (on really important occasions, she ties her hair with a red ribbon from a candy box), a white bike. I said good-bye to the owner and started to sprint for the saddle. "Ah, monsieur," he said, "cycling is truly your passion."
The photographer and I headed east along Boulevard Saint-Germain. She rode her bicycle as if she were gliding. Once she had got up speed, she spread her arms wide and moved them up and down as easily as a gull moves its wings. She was a bird, soaring along the boulevard, the light of her headlight dancing in the silvery spokes of her front wheel. The spokes chopped up the light to send it whirling in a gold-silvery sweep. A remote cousin of mine once told me he saw something like that when he looked at the spray from the hose on the lawn of his parents' suburban home in New Jersey after he had taken acid. I like bike trips myself.
The photographer was a big black bird on her bicycle. Or she was a mahout. She told me that when she held the handlebars, the round white rubber grips with the little holes at their ends, they felt like an elephant's trunk. She was a mahout, leading two elephants down Boulevard Saint-Germain. I rode at her side, trying to protect her from the odd car speeding down the boulevard at this odd hour.
We kept riding east, into the rising sun that was lined up perfectly with the street as if Boulevard Saint-Germain had been constructed by worshippers of Ra. In truth, it had been built by Baron Haussmann, the great city planner of the 1860s who put the urban freeways of his day into the city of Paris. Boulevard Saint-Germain is one of the clearways that the security-minded Haussmann tore through old Paris, too wide to be barricaded and ruler-straight to give artillery an easy shot at the mob.
Technology caught up with Haussmann when overturned cars and buses blocked his sociological fire lanes in May 1968 as thoroughly as they do right side up in every other month and year. He had not reckoned with a society that would provide its protesters not only with the raw material to erect instant barricades but the gasoline to convert them at will into fire bombs. The cops finally got their counterdeterrent, an armored bulldozer that sliced through the piled-up cars, doing only slightly more damage than if the students had been allowed to use up their energy in futile shadowboxing.
No barricade withstood such assaults in May and June 1968, no barricade save one that I saw outside the medical school on Rue des Saints-Pères that intersects Boulevard Saint-Germain. The medical students there had parked a loaded garbage truck across the street, sealing it off. The police didn't dare overturn the stewing marinating mess (something really must be rotten before a Parisian will throw it out) and, a fortiori, the students didn't go near it, either. It was the absolute defense against riot control but, as happens usually and fortunately in such cases, its deterrent power was so awesome that it never had to be used. Since the police didn't go near it, there was no riot. When no one was looking the students drove it away before the sun and the garbage got too high.
The photographer and I rode past Rue des Saints-Pères and followed Boulevard Saint-Germain as it imperceptibly changes the lift of its eyebrows and the tilt of its nostrils from Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the Latin Quarter. All these changes are measured in yards. We rode past a little hotel where the manager is Vietnamese; the price is outrageous but there is a sixth-floor room with a balcony where you can see the sun rise along the axis of Boulevard Saint-Germain.
The boulevard runs near the Seine. But it is straight and the Seine winds, so the two must meet somewhere. They do, at Pont Sully right below Pont D'Austerlitz (the reason why so few new bridges are built in Paris is that there haven't been too many victories since Austerlitz). Pont Sully hops across the Seine, using the end of Île Saint-Louis, as a stepping stone. I like the way Paris built its old bridges. They move gingerly over the river in their stone boots, suspicious of water (both salt and fresh, as all Frenchmen are except the seafaring Bretons). When the Seine grows high, the boots become boats, breasting the current with a foaming bow wave.
The photographer and I turned left where Boulevard Saint-Germain drowns itself in the Seine. We started to cross Pont Sully, named after Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully (1559-1641), minister of King Henri IV (1553-1610). In death as well as life, Sully serves his sovereign. Pont Sully leads into Boulevard Henri IV, which ends at the Bastille just as the Ancien Régime did. The word régime also means " a diet" in French, which may help you to understand a slogan I once saw painted on a wall near the Sorbonne: REGIME GAULLIST = REGIME AMAIGRISSANT.
Amaigrissant means thinning, the verb is the root of our word "meager." It is amazing how many English words now entering French as despised "Franglais" originally came from French, words like le management that is only the good French word ménager in disguise. But no Franglais is needed on the walls of Paris, French is alive there. Right near the Sorbonne wall where I saw the comment about the Gaullist regime I spotted another that said, "POMPIDOU IS A DIRTY CAPITALIST." An editor had come along to make a change: he crossed out "dirty" and wrote in "clean." The walls have voices, I can hear them in Paris when I try to get to work on my bicycle.
This is not always easy. My bike hates to go to work. It is an aquaphile, it prefers to follow the water---rivers and canals inland, hard sand on tidal beaches by the sea. The grades are easier there, hill-climbing is no problem along a waterfront or a canal. Life began along the rivers, it prospered with the canals. Much of that life is still preserved there even around cities the size of Paris or New York or Washington. Canals are smack in the middle of the eighteenth century, they belong to Louis XV or George Washington. They carry their life with them; their people are isolated high up on the levees, lock-keepers in lonely houses, the towpath running under the trees, the bike swishing through gravel where horses once plodded.
That is why my bicycle always heads over Pont Sully towards the Bastille, then east on Rue de Charenton toward the Marne. The Seine is a big river for Paris; the city stretches for miles along its banks, you need a car to get away. Not the Marne; it is winding and secretive; the barges avoid part of it by taking a canal that runs through a tunnel just outside Paris. That leaves the river pretty much to its own resources. Distances along the Marne are within a cyclist's reach. About fifteen minutes from the Latin Quarter and he is in the Bois de Vincennes, the eastern pendant of the Bois de Boulogne, but stark and deserted by those who want to be seen because they would not be seen dead in the Bois de Vincennes. Consequently, the Bois de Vincennes is alive with kite-flyers, cyclists, skippers of model yachts, wild duck colonies, rugby teams, cross-country runners, trotting horses, bettors, rookie cops in training, a rundown cartridge factory used as a theater for touring troupes, a military firing range, a vast hidden statue of Beethoven, quite a bois. On its far side, Nogent-sur-Marne starts, a suburb that thinks it's a beach resort, it even looks like a beach resort. It has a yacht harbor all its own with a lighthouse and a stretch of gravel beach much quieter than the Croisette at Cannes. The Marne is not recommended for swimming around Nogent, but I wouldn't recommend the Mediterranean around Cannes, either. The same process that destroyed river beaches a skip away from the city of Paris and drove swimmers to the sea has now worked its way to the sea itself.
Just before Nogent, the barges come back to the Marne after their tunnel. I know a road along the Marne, in some places it is tarred, in others it is a muddy path, that follows the barges as they buck the river east of Paris. On winter mornings, I can watch them from shore on my bike just above the mist laid over the water like icing on a cake. Like almonds in the icing, the pilothouses of the barges stick up from the mist, disembodied superstructures without hulls.
I can follow the barges about six miles up the river. Coming into Bry-sur-Marne, there is an island in the middle of the river, Ile des Loups, Wolves' Island. The houses along its banks are magnificent, they stand in splendid isolation, accessible only by boat. There are no roads on the island, a railroad viaduct puts one leg of an arch on the west end, but islanders cannot cross on the tracks. The shore of the island is screened by trees. When they are in leaf, the houses are gone. There is only a sliver of forest in mid-Marne, that was why wolves lived on Wolves' Island.
One day in November---it was on one of those long five-day weekends that the French school system sets aside to keep children in their parents' hair---a barge went by a brown-hulled barge running close to the shore of the island, almost under the trees. Up at the bow, a little girl was skipping rope. She was dressed in a pleated navy-blue skirt and a matching sweater; those were her holiday clothes. She had come home to the barge from her boarding school for the vacation, and her mother had told her to go out and play in the yard where her father could keep an eye on her from the pilot house as he steered the family house. The green mansions of Wolves' Island slip by the brown-hulled barge and the little girl in navy blue as she skipped rope. Round and round the rope flew under her feet and over her head, thwacking the deck, keeping time perhaps to the beat of the propeller that was thrashing away in the stern, thwacking the Marne as a housewife thwacks her laundry. I followed her a while from the bank, making no noise, stealthy as a wolf, watching the little girl on her moving playground, the rope flying, her feet never missing a skip. Then the river turned into a mess of muddled ruts and I had to look down at my wheels as the barge sailed away from me on the smooth Marne, the little girl and her jump rope still in the bow.
At Bry-sur-Marne, there is an iron footbridge that was built in 1894, so the plaque at its base reads, by the local mayor whose name has long since vanished from nearly everywhere else on the face of the earth. You climb a flight of stone steps to the top of the bridge. It is no great feat to take a racing bike up the steps with you. For those riding heavier mounts, there is a strip of cement next to the steps, just wide enough to fit the wheels of a Velosolex or a light Honda. A boathouse is boarded up, the name of its proprietor has turned a pastel whitish-pink; he probably went out of the boating business as the Marne lost its fresh bloom of youth. When the fish start floating belly up in a river, nobody wants to swim in it face down. So the boathouse closed and so did the swimming dock at the foot of the footbridge. Too bad, there is a fine little beach down there, soft sand and an easy slope into the water.
A plank walk crosses the top of the bridge, then there are the same steps leading down the other side. There is a restaurant on the left bank run by a big cheerful man in overall who sympathizes with my lot as a cyclist because he used to be a motorcycle cop. His restaurant reminds me of one of those old ocean liners with three or four classes. You can stand in the bar and match Pernods with the boss, you can dine in one of the more elegant rooms where the locals come with their dressed-up wives and their fed-up children, or you can eat with the regulars at one of the tables in the bar, table d'hôte, no menu.
Often, on Sundays, I ride out through the Bois de Vincennes and I make the restaurant at Bry in an easy hour or so, thereby solving such multifarious problems as where to eat Sunday dinner, where to go for a Sunday ride, and how to get back home without Sunday traffic. The regulars at their single tables sit in a row facing the bar, their backs to the Marne outside the big glass doors.
When the weather is good, you can eat out in the garden on steel tables and chairs right next to your bicycle. I took the photographer there once. We crossed the footbridge, parked our bikes in the garden next to the river and sat down while the waitress took our orders. As she was serving the pâté, a barge hove in sight.
The photographer raced up the stairs of the footbridge to look at the barge. Barges must be seen from above as well as from the side. Nearly every one that goes by has a collection of hens, roosters, and rabbits in its cargo of sand. The hens peck, the roosters crow, the rabbits hop, and the whole barnyard sails past the towers of Notre Dame, the turrets of the Conciergerie, the cold elegance of the Quai d'Orsay, the pricey heights of Passy looking down on the rest of the city form their lofty standard of living, the new riverfront quarter of Beaugrenelle with its fifteen-story "skyscraper" apartment houses, identical in shape, identical in size. The Parlysians keep putting up buildings that look like troops standing at attention for years, never batting a Venetian blind as the sooty rain acidly etches into their concrete, streaking the walls, cracking the cornices, the same buildings all over the city and the suburbs, at Beaugrenelle on the Seine, at Bois d'Arcy and Ris-Orangis where the Bronx has been transplanted to farmers' fields with cows all around, at Bagnolet for workers, at Garches for young executives, on the hills of Belleville and Ménilmontant in what was once the cocky tarty Paris that Maurice Chevalier sang.
These are the ideas that can come to mind as I sit in a river garden and watch a barge pass. I nibbled at the pâté, waiting for the photographer to come down from the bridge. She didn't come down; I finished the pâté, mine and some of hers, I took a sip of wine from the earthenware pitcher. Still she didn't come down. What was left of her pâté was getting warm, soon the waitress would bring out the roast pork and it would be getting cold.
I got up from the table, crossed the road, and walked up the steps of the bridge. She was not at the railing, she was on all fours in the middle of the plank walk, her rear in the air, the little stump of her ponytail jutting up like a tuft of tough grass.
"It's terrible!" she called out to me. "Come look! Quick!" I got down on all fours next to her and put my eye up against a crevice between two planks. Nothing, just the green Marne. I started to get up, the position was already straining my joints, but she said: "No, stay there! A barge is coming!" I creaked back down on the boards, hoping that we were facing Mecca so that any body passing by on the bridge would think we were Moslems at prayer and not call the wagon. The barge came up, I looked down at it through the lens of the crevice.
It was terrible. The colors of the barge, black bow, tan sand, red and blue laundry, cream roof, green funnel, black stern, flashed by under my eyes like a film, one color jammed against the other, flicking on and off the screen bounded by the edges of my lens until there was only the turmoil of the barge's wake in the Marne, white turning back into green.
Another barge was just nosing around the bend downstream. I put my head down and watched the scene again, seeing for the first time the way the photographer sees all the time. I would like to get a movie camera on that footbridge at Bry-sur-Marne, I am curious to learn if a machine can see the way she taught me to see.