Night

Filmy curtains
made from the gossamer
of mosquito wings
swirl
like the hem
of a lady's nightgown.

Darkness,
but no sleep
tonight.

At least
the air is salt.
The night
too hot
too hot
but at least
not thirsty.

There is nothing
but nothing
like a night that is thirsty.

J'ai soif,
he whispered.
Toujours soif,
encore soif.
Marseille is salt
and heat
but not dry.

Sleep doesn't come easy
in the city
with a thousand
sins
and a single truth.

So I will remain
a servant of this night.
I will watch
the play of white
against a square of living dark
and wait
to fall...
if I fall
asleep.

The City of Sound

Marseilles is a controversial city, and a pretty awful television series. I am leaving for Aix en Provence tomorrow, concluding the first leg of my very first solo travel experience. I scoured the internet for travel blogs written by unaccompanied female travelers. I read countless articles about safety. In the end, I didn't learn anything new and it all made me rather paranoid.

So paranoid, in fact, that I stopped wearing earbuds while moving around, as was my habit in Strasbourg and Syracuse. I wanted to be aware of my surroundings, alert to possible dangers. In the end it was a good choice, but not for the initial reasons.

I mean, I don't know. Maybe those are legitimate arguments. In fact, I feel like I've read somewhere that earbuds make you more susceptible to aggression because you aren't paying attention, or something.

But before I get too sidetracked, let me explain why I found music-less travel rewarding. I can't pretend it was some earth-shattering revelation, but for the first time in a long time I was aware of the sounds around me. The laughter of children, the peculiar Marseillais accent, the sound of waves, the ugly things some men said to me in the street.

Marseilles came alive in the most mundane way possible. I saw the sun on ancient stone, I smelled the fish market at 9 in the morning, I tasted the anise-sweetness of Pastis. But without headphones to pass the time waiting in the metro station, I heard the young man next to me muttering to himself as he wrote a song about some girl in Grenoble. A girl with lips like vermilion and eyes like something from "une rêverie Marocaine".

I heard the creak of the ferris wheel at the water's edge of the Vieux Port. I heard the soldiers complaining about the heat. One of them called out to me in greeting, and he tipped his beret politely in response to my equally correct response. Funny, I didn't know soldiers talked to tourists. They never do in Strasbourg, anyways.

I heard the Americans. Whole droves of them, big and small. Californians like me, and from elsewhere. I felt a sense of solidarity to them, the Californians. It made me feel- strangely- a sense of pride, a sense of patrie. Not to America, but to California.

I heard a lavender merchant cajole an older couple from Boston into buying an entire basket of little sachets to perfume the wardrobe, and bottles of essence, to calm the nerves. I visited his booth later. He was very kind. We talked and joked for a long time- a good use of my French. I bought a little bottle of essence myself, more as a gesture than anything else.

From time to time, I noticed my own voice as I spoke French. It surprised me every time, to hear the certainty and confidence. Nobody knew I had only been learning since last September. A lady selling little bracelets asked, and was flatteringly shocked. I am very proud of how quickly I have picked up French. I may never pick up the art of French dressing, or French eating habits, or ever really be able to correctly handle my fork and knife. But at least I can speak the language.

It is late. I am tired from the sun and all the walking, not to mention my brief bout of food poisoning. And just outside my window, someone is playing the clarinet. A couple is arguing. A cat is yowling. Night magic.

Gourmandise à la Cynthia

I was trying to explain Pan Catalán to Claire. I gave her the words I could and  drew in the air with my hands. We had just finished a plate of endive apiece, Claire and I. Her window was open behind her, blowing the shy perfume of rain-loosened soil into the kitchen. I drained my glass of wine. Claire refilled it automatically.

“Tiens,” she said, setting it by my plate. “Fin, c’est très à la mode, t’as remarqué?”

“Pas trop…mais j’imagine, ouais…”

We had been speaking about des gourmandises. Claire said that in the last few years it had become very popular in France to have a platter of little desserts with coffee.  I said I hadn’t noticed it especially, but could imagine that being the case.  Couldn’t you? Couldn’t you see someone taking an espresso after dinner, feeling the smoky bitterness wash away the velvety taste of wine and duck? Punctuating it with something sweet? Little tastes to stimulate the palate without detracting from the tranquillity of the café?

Of course you could.

I once had something like that back home. Vietnamese coffee with strawberries cooked in maple syrup, with little almond cakes, with candied pecans, with mixed raisins. I described it all to Claire, who sat attentively before me. I explained that the strawberries were the crowning glory, the pièce de résistance. They were sliced and cooked in maple syrup with hints of lemon zest and pepper, topped with mint. I had demanded the recipe.

“Recipe?” my friend said. “What recipe? There’s no recipe.” But she wrote down what was in it, explaining that no two batches came out the same.

“Strawberries, maple syrup (I’ve experimented with agave. Don’t you make the same mistake) lemon juice and/or zest (or any citrus, really. Sometimes I don’t bother at all), vanilla extract (not if you have that cheap Costco shit. No buts, Cynthia), pepper (non-negotiable!), and mint for garnish (or cinnamon, rosemary, lavender, or whatever the hell else. Add nuts and I’ll kill you, though).”

The corners of Claire’s mouth turned downwards and she tilted her head pensively. You know the look. It’s the universal gesture of “ah, okay, not bad.”

“ Bon, j’ai tous les ingrédients dans ma cuisine, ” and she stood with a grin. I blinked dumbly back at her. Claire started pulling things out of the cabinets: maple syrup, pepper, lemons…

“Allons-y, Cynthia.”

“Maintenant?”

“Oui!”

“Maintenant, maintenant ? “

“Ben, oui!” Claire laughed at my surprise.

So we did. We sliced the strawberries with little paring knives against our palms. Claire drowned them in maple syrup and soon the kitchen was filled with the smell of it. Sweet, tangy  warmth, mixing with the quiet smell of rain slipping in from outside.

“C’est fini?”

I shrugged. The bright crimson of the strawberries had faded somewhat, and the syrup was bubbling.

“Pourquoi pas?” I said. Grinning, Claire switched the stove off and ladled the fragrant mixture into the two bowls I handed her. I ate mine with yogurt (soy, don’t fret!) and she ate hers nature.

It was good. The lemon added acidity to cut through the heaviness of the maple syrup, and the strawberries retained their freshness. The pepper was the snap, the vanilla the muted note of class.

“C’est bon!” Claire exclaimed. “Sucré, mais pas trop. Le citron est parfait…pas trop lourd…pas du tout. ” So we finished our dessert, laughing at the spontaneity of it all, and talking politics. Claire took out an old yellow notebook book to show me. It was a recipe book she’s had for over fifty years, since she was a little girl. It was filled with recipes, but also doodles, diagrams and notes taken by Claire as a child, Claire as an adolescent, Claire as a young adult, the Claire I know today. You could see the handwriting change, become neat, then extravagant, then elegant, then simple and clean. She flipped to a blank page, and wrote:

Gourmandise à la Cynthia.

 

 

sans titre

Lately
When it rains
It really rains
I mean
It pours
Truth
Lies
Drink
Tears
N'importé quoi.

Falling apart
Maybe
Is
Knitting
Newly together
Or maybe
Not.

You're crazy.
Crazy bored
Crazy lonely
Crazy lovesick.

France.
It's a dream
A hoot in hell.
Ah
But how beautiful
Is hell.

Devils?
Elsewhere.
Broken
Or not
Who knows.

It doesn't rain
Not in
San
Diego
But
In Santa Cruz

Also
No.
Only without.

Leave
Really really really
Leave.
Can't.
Come home.
No such thing.

Lately
When it rains
It's inside
Your
Two
Waters.

Nice, Côte d'Azur

Maybe the sun will stay here a while. The quad blooms with it, with grass and daisies and frisbees.

This Summer I will visit Lyon. Perhaps Lyon will be like Nice. Nice is the first city I visited unsupervised. It is so beautiful there, with its narrow alley-streets and palm trees. I was homesick there, because it reminded me so much of San Diego. I had not realized how much I missed cacti until our train roared past the shore and I saw them, standing lone and proud, among poorer grasses.

Nice really is not much like California, besides the climate. The people are different, and the sand is different. The beaches are made of rocks that hurt when you stretch over them. But the air is sweet and fine and salty, and the rocks slowly arrange themselves to the curve of your body the longer you lay there. Soon you are as one of them- a big, fleshy stone who has created its own hollow.


We rented an AirBnb- my first- up a goodly hill not far from the center of town. It was maybe ten minutes' walk from Place Garibaldi. It was funny to me that an Italian national would have his own square in a French city. But it was not that funny and maybe I was trying to show off my learning.

We walked twenty miles a day, to the beach, to Matisse Museum, to the market to buy fresh figs and tomatoes to eat with basil grown en plein air. C'est magnifique, mademoiselle! Regardez!

Nice is the closest I have been to Italy, and Hannah dreamed of Florence as we drank fine Italian red wine with dinner. Perhaps I will go to Florence this Summer too. I have wanted to go after reading The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, and hearing him speak about it.

San Diego nights are violet, Strasbourg nights are blue, and Prague nights are the blackest of black. But in Nice, the nights are golden. Warm, molten, sensuous. The waiters were better educated than doctors. One Signor Luca spoke French, English, Spanish, and Italian. He spoke the last with our new friend, whom we met while stuck in the castle, as he brought us our aperitifs, our arrabiata, and our limoncellos. Their voices danced, lilting like an Irish brogue, but smooth like a Colombian song.

I bought some soca to eat on the train back to Strasbourg.

We missed that train, so I ate it for lunch instead, inhaling the cracked pepper smell and wiping the oil off my fingers with a napkin. (soca is a chickpea pancake sold in Nice).

Anyways, we took the night train back.

Home Again

February is fast approaching, and I haven't posted anything for nearly two months. I not only didn't post, I didn't write. Not once. I think not doing something is as habit-forming as doing it. Entertaining the idea is always much more strenuous than the act, and I think it must be like that for everyone. I was also afraid that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted to, but that's never the point anyway. Words will come like rivers, jumbled and bold and unrepentant. I am finding that they aren't the ones I look for, but they'll serve all the better for it.



I often think of Strasbourg now that I'm newly settled into my dorm in Syracuse. The last 2 things I'd posted were about the terrorist attacks in Paris. The remainder of my term was shadowed by them. I did not go to Berlin the following weekend, and people were afraid. Stunned, but life went on. Strasbourg had its Christmas Market, and it was greatly reduced by cautionary measures.



I can't help but feel that somehow I didn't appreciate my last days as well as I should have. They say you fall in love with the first city that loves you back- not your family, but you. I miss Strasbourg so much that it must be true. I miss my friends, I miss hearing the guttural elegance of Alsatian French, I miss the serpentine curls of smoke from Claire's cigarettes and the way the smell lingered for hours by her chair.

Quais Rouget de Lisle

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I whisper the tramlines to the darkened room. F, Place d'Islande and Elsau. B, Hohenheim Gare. C, Gare Central. D, Poteries. And so on. I trace my path to my university building, lingering over the tram lines and stops, and the streets I walked on. We always met at Gallia. There was a bar near there, just along the river, that we went to every weekend in the beginning. Jimmy's, it was called. I never figured out who Jimmy was.

I'm not such a child that I don't see that I miss Strasbourg because it was the site of that terrible and beautiful uncertainty,when you are more adult than child for the first time. I'm not such a grown-up that I let this fact make me sensible. Frankly, I don't have a single sensible bone in my body.

Half Timber in San Diego

San Diego is the home I knew as a child, Strasbourg the one I knew as a changeling. There will be others, of course. But these nights, these are the two that make me lay awake and think and think and think.

In my little gray-blue room in San Diego I have a box stuffed full with train tickets and the set list from the Hozier concert in Amsterdam and maps. Brown paper from the markets of Nice all the way to Fez, holding figs and oranges with fleeting ideas scribbled on them.Even a coaster I stole in a drunken stupor from Oktoberfest. When I come home in March I will put them in order. You will hear then how Rue des Cordonniers looked those fine December evenings. But some things I have in this orange sketchpad, like the angry poem I wrote after being mugged in Morocco.

There are many things I never wrote down. The Lennon Wall, the towering irony of it all, and the first Cat Cafe I ever went to was in Prague. The Tower of London, paling to the wild Irish beauty of Glendalough. Some things I will never remember, and some have become part of me, mingling with blood and bone, like San Diego during a rare storm.



I think I will go back to France next year.

Mourning Paris

(14 November 2015)
There is a candlelit vigil in Place Kleber tonight. The statue of Jean Baptiste Kléber is very stern in the flickering light, and the heavy shadows. A woman is crying as she lights her candle. Her hand is shaking a lot; it's making her entire body tremble. She is being rocked back and forth by a woman I assume is her mother. They are the spitting image of each other.

It's very strange here this evening. There are the mourners and there are the people who are always hanging around the statue. They are being very loud, laughing and swearing. They have made the vigil into an absurdity. How funny it sounds to hear French people (very drunk French people, mind you) sing along to Fetty Wap when even babies do not make a sound.

It is not drizzling, because although few, the drops that fall are fat and heavy. For weeks Strasbourg was unseasonably mild, but today it is cold. It may rain. It will rain as children cry, with tears falling to the tune of Trap Queen, which blares irreverently from a battered boom box.

Some of the candles have gone out. Some people relight the ones that have enough wick left, the ones that were blown out by wind, or upset by stomping feet. I burn my finger because the wind blew the flame onto my thumb. I hand the lighter to Anna and set the little tea candle down carefully, pushing it to an open space. 

Still it does not rain. 

It feels wrong to fall back into life's normal patterns; it feels like we ought to stop everything and be quiet and serious, and light candles. But that is not how the world is. The world would have us listen to American rappers insult women and go home, and forget after a while that 129 people died. 

Some people will never forget. We are lucky to forget.

Reflections From the Day After

Paris bleeds again. It was not so long ago that "Je Suis Charlie" posters papered every wall, every light post, every Facebook profile picture. In fact, I saw it from the tram just now, hanging faded in a store window, just past Langstross Grande Rue.

My mother told me to come home. Now. I told her that Hollande had declared "un Etats d'urgence"and closed the borders. And my mother cried. I don't think she misunderstood me, but that she knew my returning home was impossible.

We had heard about the Paris attacks last night at my friend's apartment. We were safe, warm, and happily buzzed. All of a sudden:

"Merde!" Romain said.

We did not pay much attention at first. He repeated himself and said something very quickly in French. I heard only "Paris" "terreur" and "18 morts". That was how we found out about the bombs at the friendly German-French soccer match, a game between two Western giants. The president was there, and we heard first that he was safely evacuated, and then that everyone else was. If they could be evacuated, that is.

We kept refreshing open pages on our devices. We learned that hostages were taken at the Bataclan. Nobody knew exactly how many, then 12, maybe, and then 100s. The death tolls jumped. Shootings, more than one.

"Merde!"

And contained in the word we heard the shock, the anger, and the horror- it was too early yet for fear to permeate his voice. The word had lost its original meaning, floating in the air as some audible representation of not Romain's sentiments, but of all of France. And it became vulgar for a different reason.

We left. The death toll doubled by the time I left my friends and descended onto Gare Central, climbed the escalator, and went home. Everywhere in the streets I heard:

"Paris! Paris!" There were other words too, but they blended together until they became fuzzy, and melted into the background.

There was also echoes of Romain's expletive:

"Merde!" Especially the men smoking by the tram stop.

When I arrived at my door, I shut it behind me like I was afraid to wake up the building. It was not yet 11.

"Here it is different,"Claire told me when she came home. Everyone knows someone in Paris." That is true, even for us; some Syracuse students had gone to the soccer game, and my roommate had gone to see Versailles.

I stayed up very late with Claire, watching the news. Listening to big, important men in expensive suits give speeches. Listening to the silence outside her window.

What is Pink?

There is pink, and then there is Pink.

Pink is the color of the wind when the sun sets on the French Riviera and the sky blushes softly at first, and then furiously. You have never seen Pink like this. Not when the all the world is drenched in its light, and the buildings bathe in it.

You cannot know this kind of Pink without having climbed to the Chateau de Nice first, to watch the sky burn. The cool evening air will soon dry the perspiration on your brow, and you will catch your breath after only a little while. No doubt Pink exists in many other forms, but I am not speaking of those pinks. I speak of this one, the Pink of the Bournes', that soft camellia flush.

There is a bottle of rosé in the fridge That, too, is Pink.

My Chucks

 ...climb enough staircases

to reach Heaven

and return with with a snow globe.

...step gingerly around puddles

only to sink unwittingly into mud.

The soil, you see, 

is soft and full of guile

in this part of France.

...collect lime dust,

as their owner 

counts the spirals 

in Jesus' robe.

...are removed with relief

Yonne

"I'll bet you've never seen a French hamlet before," our professor said. There was a rousing chorus of assent as we filed off the bus. My father came from a small village in China that I suppose could also be called a hamlet, but I'm not sure. It wasn't anything like what we saw as we stood in the gray light of Yonne, waiting for everyone to collect their bags from the underbelly of the bus.

Vezelay

After spending the day and most of the afternoon in Vezelay, we came here, to Yonne. What remains of the day is cold, overcast, and gloomy. A little while ago, perhaps at 18:30, it began to drizzle. It's still drizzling without any sign of increasing or decreasing in intensity. It's an earnest, steady addition to our day.

I cannot speak, as I've lost my voice sometime in the night. It's a good excuse. I don't want to talk much, and not having a voice is a very good excuse. When you can't speak above a rasp, no one tries very hard to engage you in conversation.

Yonne is a very small place. Boring, maybe. But it's beautiful. There are apple trees belonging to the street they grow beside. They are far from the orchards and so some of us leaned over the hollows and plucked a few choice fruits. The fields are green-velvety- or brown-freshly tilled. Yesterday was warm, when we were in Dijon, and earlier today in Vezelay, but now it's anything but. It's an exercise in getting acquainted with a dreary kind of beautiful.

I walked very slowly along the dirt roads, smiling to acknowledge my friends as they skipped gaily by. I would that I were alone in this place. It's peaceful, but not the kind that comes from roaring waves- the peace that I know. The silence is profoundly startling. And it magnifies whatever sound erupts from whatever source.

I think this is a nice place to be tired in. The idea of an idyllic farm life is inviting. I do not think that I need to tell you that this is a dream of Yonne that we see. I cannot know what such an existence is really like, and all I've got, really, is generalization and fantasy. Perhaps I'd hate it here. Perhaps what seems peaceful now will grow monotonous, for I think I need the roar of waves. Perhaps the dogs that come barking to greet us will grow less charming in time.

But it seems unlikely. And for now, the dream tastes real and I will leave and remember the lingering sweetness.

 

 

Dijon Stone

What is dirty here

is soiled from passing years.

And what is water-stained

has withstood tears.

What is whole 

fears

what is broken

and crumbling

and grand.

The stones of Dijon house 

what bleeds prayer.