LITMIR.BIZ

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essence, half lusted, half feared like a forbidden fruit, America had been but one of a thousand islands in a huge archipelago of youthful fantasies. Yesterday, in the unbroken vastness of the steel-blue sea, America had been the future. Yesterday, there was a tomorrow to anticipate, a reality as yet unconsummated among a stockpile of nebulous expectations. It was an indwelling, irreducible now that I faced as the colossus dissolved into a nether realm of vapor and shadows and ghostlike vessels heaving in the channel’s inky waters.

      The man grabbed my wrist and repeated, “America. Can it be? I’ve waited so long.”

      “Now look, sir,” I wanted to tell the man, “it’s adventure I seek, not sanctuary. Yes, I’m nomad, restless vagrant, drifter, a wandering Jew beguiled by locomotion, a gypsy craving new horizons, a vagabond enlivened not by landings but by ceaseless migrations, a wayfarer steering not toward the nearest port of call but chasing after the open sea on a journey without end. I’m all that, I grant you. Like my father before me, I roam, seeking both uniformity and self-regeneration through change, finding constancy and coherence in mutability, endlessly coveting a foretaste of the things only anticipation hint at. But I am no refugee, I tell you, no battered remnant of war, and I resent that I might be mistaken for one. Unhand me, please.”

      But I said nothing. I didn’t have the heart. A youthful insolence still percolating in my veins, traumatized by the inexplicable reality in which I’d suddenly been drawn, I wanted to distance myself from this tempest-tossed wretched refuse who like millions, had reached the golden door of America’s promise. I ambled instead to the starboard side, the overcoat my parents had purchased a fortnight earlier no match against the arctic chill. Manhattan’s skyline rose before me, a monochrome carcass, unreal, like a theater backdrop, grotesque in its breadth and bulk, and rendered all the more forbidding as memories of Paris, my beloved Paris, submerged my mind’s eye with tears. I blamed the wind. I didn’t want the man to think that they were tears of relief or elation.

      *

      Montmartre. Frame by frame, I relive the moment: A cobbled courtyard. Madame Muche, the concierge, is there, ruddy-cheeked, feinting peevishness but susceptible to gallantry. A blue denim apron girds her opulent rotundity. She is mopping the portico’s weather-worn stoop. A vague odor of fried onion wafts from her unshaven armpits.

      “Bonjour, Madame Muche.”

      “Bonjour, jeune homme. Alors, l’école, ça va?”

      “Tout va très bien, merci. And how are things with you?”

      “Bof, as you see, a million chores, little time, only ten fingers.” Josephine Muche props the broom handle against a broad, sallow cleavage and shows me the palms of her hands. “Just look at them. Have you ever seen anything so pathetic?”

      I mumble words of commiseration and offer her some chocolate. She blushes like a schoolgirl then scolds me softly.

      “You shouldn’t. I’m on a diet. My liver, you know.” But she takes the offering and devours it all the same and the sugar triggers another burst of irascibility, this time aimed at her husband, Maurice, a burly, warmhearted Paris gendarme, who is pumping air in their six-year-old son Lucien’s bicycle.

      “Some people have it easy,” Josephine demurs, raising her eyebrows. “He’s off today. You’d think he’d use his big muscles, the lunkhead, and help a little.

      “Pay her no heed, mon petit,” rejoins Maurice, grinning. “It’s pure theater. She should have been on stage, the woman. She’s got enough talent for two, n’est-ce-pas?” Maurice spreads his arms, draws two semi-circles in the air and cups his enormous hairy hands on the downward curve as if to enfold an imaginary pair of buttocks. Mortified, Madame Muche bites her lower lip, peers over her glasses and shakes an outraged finger at her husband. But outrage gives way to amusement and she surrenders a good-natured smile.

      “Ah, les hommes! Men. They’re all the same.”

      Emboldened, Maurice aims the bicycle pump at his wife’s behind.

      “We can’t let the air out of such talent, can we?”

      Little Lucien squeals with delight.

      “Do it, papa, do it.”

      His mother parries, raises the broom and threatens to hit her husband over the head.

      “Now, now, mon amour.” Maurice cowers with feigned terror. “Who loves his little Fifine? Her little Momo, non?” Madame Muche melts. They lay down their weapons and embrace. Monsieur Muche grabs Madame’s generous posterior and declares with Gallic showmanship, “if that’s not talent, I don’t know what is....”

      “Run for your life,” Madame Muche exhorts. “This man is incorrigible. I’m liable to.... Oh, la la!”

      I retreat, laughing, and scale four flights up a steep, creaking wooden stairway sagging from a century or more of clambering feet. Each narrow landing gives onto two small apartments with tiny rooms and eccentric plumbing. I’m embarked on a dizzying voyage up a spiral gullet resonating with discordant sounds and reeking with disparate exhalations, all vying for dominance. The fullness of their vitality haunts me still: I can smell Mademoiselle Vauclair’s Friday fare -- cabbage soup, chicken gizzards and fried leeks. Madame Jabois’ tremulous renditions of Mistinguett’s classic, Mon Homme, later reprised by Fanny Brice in My Man, echo as she sloshes twice weekly in her Empire brass tub. Monsieur Vacheron’s stentorian voice thunders like a summer storm as he barks at his eight-year-old daughter, Monique, over some petty infraction. Next door, Sylvie Lefèvre, unkindly favored by nature, stridently denies her husband's absurd accusations of infidelity with the butcher’s errand-boy. Eugène Lefèvre knows his wife is incapable of disloyalty but morbid suspicion sharpens his libido and they eventually bury their sham conflict in furious and sonorous make-up sex.

      Mornings bring the redolence of croissants, evenings the aroma of freshly baked baguettes. Radios hum in cacophonous unison, summarizing soccer scores, blasting the latest popular hits or reporting on some faraway conflict. I can hear the Golaud children repeating their verses in an exhausting drone as the garlic in Madame Morabito’s ailloli and the commingling vapors of hearty wines and pungent beers waft and settle in mid-air.

      In this olfactory and sonic Babel also lived Wanda, her presence foretold by the heavy perfume she wore -- Mitsouko by Guerlain -- and the lugubrious wails she emitted at odd hours of the day and night, compliments of a mercifully discreet assortment of suitors. She had an unpronounceable Polish name so everyone called her “La Vanda” or “l’anglaise,” even though she hailed from Steubenville, Ohio, via Tangiers and other Byronic locales, all tested and abandoned in favor of Paris. Wanda was a tall, cadaverous middle-aged expatriate, the living caricature of many a castaway I would chance upon in Hamburg and Tegucigalpa, Marseilles and Port-of-Spain. Bedaubed with funereal make-up, she had an incurable American twang and a weakness for gin. I’d vainly tried to sharpen my English and often engaged her in conversation about Chicago and gangsters and cowboys and Indians and Hollywood and skyscrapers and the mighty Mississippi -- pretty much all I knew about America. But “l’anglaise” was either too drunk to contribute useful intelligence or she’d invariably insist on trading sex for the education I yearned. I never took her up on it. I’d often wandered what it might be like to fuck an American but a mixture of pity and revulsion made such commerce unlikely.

      There are women one hungers for even after; others from whom one is sated well before.

      Only the Bredoux brothers -- Bernard and Bertrand -- veterans of La Grande Guerre, never married and subsisting on their pensions, lived in unsettling silence amid the dissonance and ubiquitous effluvia. They were kind-hearted souls with gentle smiles and simple truths, not given to idle chatter but always ready to comfort or encourage. I could see them now, their tall, lanky frames bent by age, a vague mustiness exuding from their taupe-colored cardigans, as they read the papers by the window -- France Soir and old copies of Le Petit Parisien. They’d been generous with their baskets of green Normandy apples and

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