This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  * * *

  All this stuff was running round my head while I was on the platform waiting for the train. I was going to Nancy to take part in a literary game, which was actually a commission. It was the strangest proposition I’d ever been offered as a writer, or the second strangest, perhaps. The idea was I had to go to have dinner in the house of some people I don’t know, together with other guests, and then write something about the experience or the conversations that came up during the evening. They weren’t strangers chosen haphazardly. No, it wasn’t as if you just rang at any old door and announced you were going there for dinner. The organizers had taken care in selecting as hosts people who liked talking, listening, and discussing, who were interested in literature, and who, in turn, could tell me things about Nancy or whatever else they felt like.

  Apart from the mystery of going into the house of strangers and sharing several hours with them, knowing I’d probably never see them again unless something unexpected happens to change our lives—which tends not to be the case—what most intrigued me was how all this might be filtered into a story. As I understand it, there are two kinds of narrators: hunters and fishers. Hunters go out to get the literary material, setting off into unknown territories with all their senses on the alert to find a story, a character, a thread to tug at, or revelation that will open up the way of the word, almost like medieval knights getting into their armor, mounting their steeds, and riding off into adventure. Then there are the fisher narrators who sit on the riverbank and cast a line. They’re still and patient, quietly waiting for the fish to take the bait. If the story doesn’t come their way, they ponder life and fill the waiting time with imagination and thoughts, and at the end of the day it might happen that what they’ve actually caught is more or less an excuse to describe everything that’s been swimming around in their heads.

  I can’t say what kind of narrator I am. Sometimes I’m a kind of axman striding out to hunt and other times, perhaps more often, I just stay still and try to fish. I was thinking all this on the train and, in fact, I realized that, right then, I was doing both things at once: I was going somewhere looking for a story and at the same time I was sitting still looking at the scenery. What I could see through the window was fairly monotonous anyway. Green plains of central Europe, newly harvested fields, deep, wide rivers, and, in the distance, forests and bell towers steeped in the colors of afternoon sunlight. Sometimes the train stopped at a medium-size town—Bettembourg, Thionville, Hagondange—and now, about an hour into the journey, we were coming into Metz. We left behind an industrial park and slowly entered the city center, and if I’m talking about this, it’s because I noticed a stretch of tents and shacks made of cardboard and cloth. A miniature city improvised inside another city. You could see movement there, especially women working at something or sitting in groups. It seemed that they’d settled in the parking lot behind a shopping mall and next to a loading dock.

  “Refugees,” someone in the compartment said. He must have seen me looking intently through the window and was almost answering my thoughts. “A few months ago the police broke up this camp, but they’ve been coming back in dribs and drabs.”

  “Are they Syrians?” I asked.

  “No, as far as I know, most of them are Albanians and Kosovars. They come through the Baltic countries. They want documents, of course, and they’re waiting. Weeks and weeks until the government can find somewhere to house them. They’re counting on a solution by the fall, before the cold sets in.”

  I wanted to ask him about the city hall and public opinion, but we pulled into the Metz railway station. I had to change trains and lost sight of my informant. Ten minutes later I was settled in another compartment. The car was quite full, and as we pulled out of the station, two young women came in and sat down. They were about twenty, trendily dressed in tight jeans and designer blouses. The one sitting opposite me took a makeup kit from her handbag. Her expression was glassy and her eyes swollen from crying.

  “Did you lock the door?” she asked her friend. She said it in French but I picked up a strong accent. She was probably American.

  “No,” said the other one. “You had the keys, didn’t you?”

  They both laughed. They were sharing a bottle of orange juice, which they passed back and forth. The one opposite me patted her pockets and confirmed that, yes, she did have the keys. Then they went on with the conversation. Neither of them was convinced that the door had been locked. I understood that with all the rush and excitement of getting away they’d probably forgotten about it.

  “Well, I left my suitcase and bags in the entrance,” said the worrier, now busy redoing her eye shadow. “If people see it’s not locked, they only have to take three steps and grab the lot. It’s that easy.”

  “No, it’s not that easy. From outside, the door looks locked,” said her friend, trying to reassure her. Then she changed the subject. “So, anyway, how did he react? Tell me again.”

  “Nothing to tell. He said he’ll come and see me in Cleveland in the summer, but I know he won’t. They say these things and then they don’t happen. When he saw I was starting to cry, though . . .” She fell silent for a moment. “I think we have to go back. It’s too risky.”

  Her friend, who was sitting next to me, huffed in exasperation. “But what about Nancy? When can we go?”

  “We’ve still got time. We’ll go home, lock the door properly, and get the next train. We’ll only lose an hour.”

  “I think you did lock the door. We’ll be going all the way back for nothing. And we’ll be really annoyed when we get there and see that it was locked all the time! You only have a few hours left in France, and this is how you go and waste them . . .”

  They went on arguing for another ten minutes, until we got to the next station, where they got out. They didn’t say goodbye to me. Didn’t say anything. I might as well not have been there. I couldn’t work out what they were going to do in Nancy either, whether it was important or not. For a few moments I thought there was another boyfriend involved, and some money, and I must confess I was about to intervene in the conversation and ask what was going on. If I’d done that, I would have become a hunter-writer, then and there, but I think I desisted, because the time wasn’t right yet. I hadn’t even got to Nancy and didn’t want to seem like a predator, a guy desperate to grab a good story, and the sooner the better. When the train started moving again, I watched them walking along the platform. The woman from Cleveland was carrying the bottle of orange juice in her hand. She saw me at the window and our eyes met for a few seconds. She stopped in her tracks as if she remembered something and made a grimace of surprise, which was frozen by the movement of the train. Then I couldn’t see her anymore. Forgotten on the seat opposite me lay her makeup kit.

  * * *

  The makeup kit is here in front of me as I write these words. I kept it. A useless trophy. It’s a long, narrow case containing everything you’d expect to find. Eye shadow, face powder, and even a little mirror. I take out the lipstick, ketchup red, and open it. Now I could say that I’m putting it on my lips, and I like it, like myself, and the little mirror reflects my mouth, so I pout at it, thinking this isn’t me, that I’m another biography, even that of the jumpy, teary American woman. Or that, when the train got to Nancy, I discovered that, inside the makeup case, there was a card with a phone number, which I called and it was a striptease club, or that there was a photo of the woman with some guy, or even an engagement ring that looked more like costume jewelry . . . All at once I can see a whole slew of possibilities, and there’d even be more if I added the refugees I saw from the train coming into Metz. After all, they lived in the same city as that young woman, passing through like she was, with their whole lives packed into bits of luggage . . . But then I tell myself to calm down.

  When I got to the hotel in Nancy, I went up to my room and unpacked my bag. The atmosphere, the ritual, and the movements we all make when we go into a hotel room made me feel like someone w
ho is used to this nomadic life, like a traveling salesman. It dawned on me that maybe that was what they wanted from me, to be a peddler of stories, except I was going there to buy and not to sell. In an attempt to combat this uncomfortable sensation, I put the few clothes I’d brought in the wardrobe and left a couple of books and a folder on the desk, trying to give the room some personality. I needed to inhabit it. I went to the toilet and then stretched out on the bed to test the quality of the mattress and especially the softness of the pillows. I always do that.

  Lying there, with his eyes closing, the man recalled a passage from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet: “Only those who don’t seek are happy, because only those who don’t seek find.” Therefore, it was about not looking for anything, and when he woke up from his late siesta, he went out into the street in that spirit. It was six in the afternoon in Nancy and the sun was setting.

  That evening he had no dinner commitment and, with the same ease with which a narrator can switch from first to third person, started walking in the city. In the portfolio the organizers had left for him at the hotel, there was a map of Nancy. He looked at it for a moment and decided to head west, toward the old quarter. Then he put it in his jacket pocket.

  A few days earlier, in Barcelona, a French friend had told him about the discreet beauty of Nancy and how art nouveau façades appeared in the most surprising places. She told him not to miss the potent splendor of Place Stanislas, with its golden gateways, centuries-old cobblestones, and inviting terrace bars full of people. However, he deliberately avoided it. When he saw that the end of the street opened into a wide square and heard the murmur of voices, he went off in a different direction. Since he hadn’t been given the address, he kept toying with the idea that one of those houses might be where he was going to end up the next day, having dinner with a bunch of strangers. He could go to any door and ring the bell, pretending he’d got the day wrong. Then the more-than-stranger strangers, which is to say people who’d never as much as thought about meeting him, would tell him that he hadn’t gotten the day wrong but the place, because they weren’t expecting anyone, or maybe they’d let him in, but most probably they’d coolly bid him goodbye, because who knows what he might have interrupted.

  These imagined scenes appealed to him and mortified him in equal measure. He couldn’t avoid indulging, and yet he felt tainted, as if he were cheating. The exercise of being a non-searcher was leading to total inertia, but if that was the case, it would have been better to stay in his hotel room and watch the news on television. After half an hour of aimless walking he came to a square with a fountain and an equestrian statue in the middle. It was an unassuming square, perhaps because it lay in the intimidating shadow of a neo-Gothic church, and it had a strange name: Place Saint-Épvre. Here, too, there were three or four terrace bars, but they were a little untidy looking and their clients seemed to be regulars, local residents. He sat down outside a brasserie and asked for a flask of wine and a serving of quiche Lorraine with salad. From where he was sitting he could see a patisserie with the usual bustle of that hour on a Friday afternoon, a closed travel agency, and a woman who was in the process of closing her flower stall. Next to him, a gentleman was enjoying a beer and reading L’Est Républicain but also looking up occasionally to greet people walking by. He did this with practiced elegance, as if the corner of his eye was more attentive to them than to his newspaper.

  It all had an everyday air, and from his table he admiringly took in the whole scene. In tranquil harmony, cars, passersby, and pigeons were all getting on with things as if on a movie set, and he almost expected a director somewhere in the wings to call out, “Action!” He took a sip of wine, diligently savoring it as if by acting, too, he could get this sham idea out of his head.

  In a way that was very natural, he went back to Place Saint-Épvre a few more times during his stay in Nancy. He even sat in the same chair twice. Although he went at different times of the day, he was looking for the feeling of repetitive routine. He wanted the waiters to recognize him, and on the last day his intimate victory was when the man reading L’Est Républicain looked up and greeted him with a nod as he approached on the sidewalk.

  * * *

  The next day he got up in a different mood. When you wake up after spending a night in a new city, you feel as if it’s more yours. Since he had the whole day free—his appointment for dinner with the strangers wasn’t until seven that evening—he kept strolling around Nancy without a map. He’d cross the bridge over the railway line, head toward the riverside walk, and go into the cathedral. Random wandering would be his way of relating with the city, stitching it together in little bits as if a detective were following him and it was necessary to make him understand that he wasn’t looking for anything. He mentally shied away from the word “serendipity.”

  Having breakfast in the hotel dining room, he overheard a conversation at a nearby table: two young women talking about literature, the novels they’d read recently, and a woman writer they couldn’t stand. All of a sudden there was a crash. At another table a man had fallen to the ground when he was going to sit down. In fact, the chair had broken. Its design was too flimsy for his weight. He went to help the man up and retrieved from the floor two small paperbacks and a sheaf of crumpled papers. He peeked at the content: notes for a talk on the work of Marie Darrieussecq. Later on, in the street, this sensation of a literary plot only intensified. Two young guys standing at some traffic lights were discussing the relevance of symbolist poetry today. When he reached the Excelsior brasserie, he thought he saw James Ellroy—recognizable because of his Hawaiian print shirt—who was crossing the street, looking dejected, and as if he was running away from someone. When he walked past the L’Autre Rive bookshop he saw that it was jam-packed and, at the very back, a young woman was reading aloud to the crowd. These coincidences kept happening over and over again, all morning. He took refuge in a café and found that the waiter spoke in Alexandrine verse, like a Victor Hugo in modern-day Lorraine. This was the world turned topsy-turvy, a conspiracy aimed at getting him to stop his aimless drifting, and it forced him to remember that he wasn’t desperate and wasn’t looking for anything.

  Walking where his feet took him and blindsided by this surfeit of literary signals, he inadvertently came to Place Stanislas. Then he understood everything. At one end of the lordly expanse, some panels announced that there was a major literary festival in Nancy that weekend. “More than two hundred guest writers,” one pennant proclaimed. People were queuing at the entrances of buildings to hear their favorite authors, buy books, and ask for an autograph.

  Faced with this scene, the first reaction of Felipe Quero—now it’s time to give him a name—was to turn tail and vanish. He’d certainly feel like a traveling salesman there! Moreover, the milieu wasn’t in the least inspiring. He couldn’t stand fiction about writers. As a reader, he felt it was far removed from reality, anecdotal, and smug. As an author, if he tried to write about the small talk and squabbles of the people in his trade, he felt false and naked.

  The discovery opened up a crack in his self-esteem. Sure, a literary festival . . . but how come the organizers hadn’t even mentioned it? This jab at his pride put him on his guard. His name didn’t appear among those of the two hundred guest writers, which quickly led to a premonition. What if the dinner was a pretext to make fun of him? The French are capable of cooking up that kind of trick . . . Maybe the invitation concealed a trap that would turn him into literary fodder, a joke in bad taste. Now he had to be vigilant.

  Perturbed and aggrieved, he was thinking about all this as he was walking away, but at the same time, with each step he took, he was increasingly aware of a physical lightness that was unusual for him. He wasn’t carrying a briefcase or anything cumbersome and, happily sticking his hands in his pockets, he realized that, in this particular vanity fair, nothing about him would give him away as a fiction writer. He could move around totally incognito. So he went into one of the tents and strolle
d past the book stalls. It was full of people. Behind their tables, writers were waiting for readers to come and ask for a signature. A lot of them looked bored but, managing to stay patient, were covering up their jadedness by flipping through the pages of some book or another by the publisher concerned (although an hour later they wouldn’t even recall the title).

  Felipe Quero observed them indifferently, like someone on the other side of the looking glass, and this double-agent mode made him feel more confident. When he tired of staring at writers, he went off to the other end of the fair, near the Parc de la Pépinière, and entered a street that, he worked out, should take him to Place Saint-Épvre. At some point, however, he changed course, because he was now walking toward one of the city’s medieval gateways, the Porte de la Craffe. He crossed over to admire its majestic, ominous presence and, once on the other side of the road, noticed a rather odd couple, a man and a woman, well into their sixties—pensioners, perhaps. The woman was looking at the gateway and he was taking her photo. Felipe Quero saw that the setup was strange. The man didn’t seem at all interested in the two towers and the whole massive defensive structure but, rather, in his wife looking at the complex, as if the Porte de la Craffe was only worthy of attention when she was observing it, and precisely because she was observing it. Felipe moved away from the scene and walked down the main street, where shops along both sides were offering all sorts of tourist enticements. Not long afterwards, he ran into the couple again. Now the woman was admiring the Palace of the Dukes of Lorraine, its white façade and Gothic-style balconies, and her man was immortalizing her in the act of contemplating the monument. On this second occasion he noticed that she was well aware of being photographed and was adopting a certain pose. The connection between them seemed to be a desire to play or to act something out. Their performance looked affected and even perverse, and for the first time since he’d arrived in Nancy, Felipe thought that it might be worth pulling at that narrative thread. He watched them from a discreet distance, wondering whether to follow them or not, but the couple disappeared into a patisserie, and he took this as a sign to leave them to it.