The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  “But don’t worry about that souvenir, man,” I assured him again; “it’s pretty much worthless.”

  Later at night, he usually headed over to the Kentucky Fried Chicken, a cavernous, weirdly illuminated place on Boulevard de Strasbourg emanating its greasy aroma for a couple of blocks in the warm bruised-blue evenings now that it would finally be dark. There he would buy a Coke to entitle him to go to a table in a quiet corner of the first floor for an hour or two and use the free Wi-Fi provided, seeing that there was no connection at Oncle Robert’s sprawling apartment. Still, no matter where he was off to while I wrote during the day or in the evening, for me his return was always the best part of his being in Paris that week or so. Such return involved some complication because the ancient intercom buzzer system had been disabled and all but ripped out temporarily in the recent refurbishing, an exposed spaghetti of wires beside the apartment’s entry door and not yet replaced. That meant my nephew and I would have to arrange beforehand when I should expect him and look down to Rue Saint-Martin, an approximate time for him to show up in front of a tiny Japanese restaurant across the street. I would go to one of the long French windows, and the two of us would exchange waves and smiles, then I would bound down the several flights of the spiral staircase—the small creaking elevator was slow, actually a rather dangerous affair—and unlatch the tall carved-wood door beyond the rez-de-chaussée with its potted palmettos at the street. Sometimes I lost track of time altogether as I worked on my writing at the clicking keyboard of my laptop set atop a vanity dresser, tortoiseshell veneer, that became my impromptu desk in the pale pink front bedroom, and then, checking my watch, realizing I was late and now going to the window in a bound—the apartment was too high for there to be any real vocal communication with the street below—I would see him patiently waiting, sitting down on the curb and contentedly watching the people and cars go by, smiling when he looked up and saw me again. I think I really liked how he would almost materialize there that way. After that we would sit around relaxing in the living room that could only be called vast (I once paced it off at 40 feet), complete with a grand piano and elegant, if badly faded and worn, Oriental carpets. There would be a can of Stella Artois beer for me and a big bottle of fruit juice for him, plus for both of us the paprika snack peanuts the French love; the long row of French windows all open to the summer night, an occasional Klaxon horn of an ambulance or gendarme squad car blaring loud, we’d talk more about what had happened to him during his day, laughing some in the course of it all, even discussing at length the screenplay he was working on for his summer-school class at Brown, the two of us bouncing back and forth ideas that he might blend into the plot and my soon getting as excited about it as he was.

  Which meant that when he left, I drifted into a funk for a few days. I missed his company. The many rooms of the apartment seemed beyond empty, and then the all-too-predictable doubts and big questioning set in. You know, that kind of recurrent self-interrogation that perhaps many writers getting a bit older tend to conduct. And had I spent all too much of my own life sitting in a room alone and conjuring up in my fiction—with an endless flow of words and words and more words still—merely some phantom life, not real in the least and surely as incorporeal as the moonlight on the complicated slate mansard rooftops sprouting their ancient chimney pots I’d often stare at outside the apartment in Paris on those summer nights? It all brought up memories of past girlfriends I probably should have married along the way, starting a family of my own, that kind of dangerous thinking.

  And more than once after writing all day, alone, I took long walks in the evening. And more than once I inevitably ended up there again, above the steps by the Gare de l’Est and at the café called Au Train de Vie.

  The second large sadness was, of course, much more pronounced and certainly larger and heavier, if sadness itself can be quantitative, measured as a matter of sheer leaden emotional avoirdupois.

  It just so happened that all that summer an old pal from Austin was in a hospital called Fernand-Widal in Paris, had been there for over a year, actually.

  He was from Algeria, but with full dual citizenship in the U.S. I had known him for a long time, part of an international clique of guys in Austin who first gravitated together due to common interests and especially political world outlook. I guess that I myself was somebody who seemed to fit in with the group, being from a land far from Texas—New England—and therefore also a foreigner in Texas to begin with, which qualified me for at least pseudo-international standing; plus there was my track record of having logged a lot of time incessantly traveling in other parts of the world—Africa, India, plenty of Latin America, both the Spanish-speaking countries and marvelously (the only word for a place like that) Brazil. He was a stockily rugged, happy-go-lucky guy, seemingly always grinning. He’d never used his petroleum engineering degree from the University of Texas but had found a good lifestyle in cooking at a restaurant, a job balanced with working some import-export business deals over the Net with his brother in Algiers. A bachelor himself, my friend dated with about the same amount of pleasantly comical success and failure as I, the two of us often joking about that, dating at our age, and he was so athletically fit that, past 50, he still played soccer and refused to own a car, walking and bicycling everywhere.

  Then it happened. Simply and suddenly, he suffered a debilitating massive stroke, which led to a bleak succession of failures that if looked at in any detail, or illustrative frankness, would sway the opinion, I suspect, of even the staunchest, most stingy-hearted Tea Partier robotically moaning about the alleged evils of American health care reform. After time in the ICU of Austin’s municipal hospital, where he wasn’t given the immediate physical therapy he needed because he lacked medical insurance, it only turned worse. My friend was moved to a supposedly state-accredited nursing home on an empty rural road out in the dry blond flatland peppered with scrub mesquite and prickly pear just beyond the city limits. It was a setup that looked like an abandoned and pathetically lost motel in the middle of that sunbaked nowhere, a packed-to-the-limit place surrounded by stark chainlink fence, and within—and despite the best efforts of the friendly yet overworked staff—about as clean as, and smelling much like, the restroom of an interstate bus station; confused, disoriented patients in foam-rubber slippers and untied hospital johnnies wandered aimlessly in the linoleum corridors; frightening moans of the bedridden could be heard from the open doors of some rooms as you passed. Honestly. It didn’t take long to realize that the patients were just being stockpiled, the modus operandi of Texas’s inept Medicaid program, among the stingiest in the nation, according to published figures. When my friend’s sister and her husband—originally from Algiers and now living in France—showed up to bring him to Paris according to a long-standing treaty that existed between Algeria and its onetime colonizer, France, allowing an Algerian citizen to get medical assistance in France if the variety of specific treatment needed wasn’t available in Algeria, it was their first time in the U.S.; both of them were amazed, if not silently appalled, that this was actually the United States, that something like the nursing home was, in fact, to be found in a nation supposedly so powerful and prosperous.

  And so in Paris I’d go in the afternoon to visit him a couple of times a week at L’Hôpital Fernand-Widal. It was an old yet entirely immaculate operation, smallish and constructed in 1858, according to the plaque out front. Fernand-Widal catered to special services, including the kind of long-term rehab my friend needed, and it was located up toward Montmartre and in a busy quartier of Paris that was as vividly Indian as my own neighborhood was vividly African. I’d pass the receptionist in his casual blazer sitting at the hospital’s little check-in desk—he’d gotten to recognize me and simply waved me along—and then go first through the outer courtyard, mostly parking, and then through the rear courtyard—some crisscrossing gravel walks and a long central arcade of box-cut lime trees, parklike—where I’d enter the quiet building and head
up the stairs to “Secteur Bleu” and my friend’s room, 104. I’d usually find him alone there and set up in a chair, often dozing off with the TV flickering on a news station; my friend had always been a news junkie, better versed than probably anybody I’d ever known on the political situation of just about every country around the world. At the door, I’d maybe say his name, and he would wake with a smile as I entered the room, painted a fresh light blue and the same hue of everything else in Secteur Bleu, with the hospital gown and the crisp sheets on the neatly made bed all a matching light blue, too. Even if his speech was severely marred by the stroke, his dark eyes would widen, he would say only one word, breathy in his condition but the grin—showing two missing teeth pulled during his hospitalization—wider than ever:

  “Pete.”

  Some French alternated with some English as I sat on the bed’s edge and we talked. There was his filling me in on my questions about his condition: if he was getting nourishment (he had lost the ability to swallow, was fed through a stomach tube); and how he was being treated (the wife of a French writer acquaintance of mine was a nurse, and she told me that L’Hôpital Fernand-Widal was top-notch, with my Algerian friend himself now assuring me that the nurses were good, the doctor who was in charge of his case was especially good—also, several of the staff were Algerian, so he felt very comfortable with them); and if his therapy was going well (unlike the stockpiling of patients out in the bleak Texas flatland, here he was given a full morning of vigorous therapy every weekday, a real regimen where progress was monitored and assessed regularly). Yes, after the routine questions, everything slipped into casual, surprisingly mundane conversation. Talk concerning guys from our circle back in Austin, and always much talk about the upcoming election and Obama, whom he greatly admired. With such relaxed conversation, laughter, too, the whole idea of my friend being incapacitated could seem to me like nothing but a dream in itself that we both had inadvertently stumbled into. I mean, a couple of years before would I have foreseen anything like the scene of the two of us meeting in a hospital room in Paris like this, birds chirping in the lime trees outside the open window there in the courtyard where nurses wheeled patients this way and that to enjoy the afternoon sunshine, my friend writing words on a yellow legal pad when, as hard as we both tried to communicate, I sometimes couldn’t understand the syllables he struggled to get out? And maybe as with a dream, I sometimes felt that all it would take would be a little jarring (hearing the phone in my bedroom ringing back where I really was, possibly, at home in Austin? or the sound of a growling truck clankingly emptying the Dumpster below my apartment window when waking in the early morning back in Austin?), yes, something to jar me out of it all, this odd dream, with normalcy and life as it should be restored once more.

  Some sadness, all right.

  And that summer I thought about my friend so much. I continued to walk in the evening and, needless to add, ended up where I did go repeatedly, climbing the winding stone steps again to that place where I somehow definitely had to be, there behind the Gare de l’Est.

  Actually, maybe it’s time now to turn to what I mentioned earlier, the writers who have offered their own input on what I’m trying to get at, this key idea of a voice calling you to a particular location, which probably often happens while traveling. And it seems I should address Borges first.

  The essential book of Borges in English translation is certainly the popular miscellany of his work, Labyrinths, a paperback published in 1962 by New Directions and reprinted who knows how many times. If you thumb toward the latter pages of the book, you will come to, on page 217, what has always been for me Borges’s most powerful essay. Titled, as I said earlier, “A New Refutation of Time,” it’s presented as a two-part affair (a tricky configuration, with several textual reversals that in themselves challenge chronology), and in it, through dazzling verbal legerdemain, Borges examines many of those from the long string of philosophical idealists who questioned the very reality of the supposed reality of existence, all descended from dreamy-minded Father Plato (who begat Berkeley, who begat Hume, who begat Schopenhauer, etc.). Borges even includes a consideration of Twain’s Huck, as he, Borges, shows how time and also space are not the geometric, rigidly enforced concepts we often too readily believe they are, re-creating a scene from the Twain novel to reinforce how a strange and inexplicable feeling is possibly more befitting than any reasonable understanding of time and space being what actually defines experience:

  During one of his nights on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn awakens; the raft, lost in partial darkness, continues downstream; it is perhaps a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft indefatigable sound of the water; he negligently opens his eyes; he sees a vague number of stars, an indistinct line of trees; then, he sinks back into his immemorable sleep as into the dark waters.

  With that reference and a pile of others, Borges eventually establishes the fragile nature of reality as we know it, just a glimpse of something fleeting and never clearly defined, there amid another more important psychic territory altogether. All the while, Borges is moving toward a detailed personal illustration of what he means. He describes how on an evening in 1928, while strolling in Buenos Aires, he found himself in a locale where he did seem to have gotten free of time and space as they are commonly accepted to be, had entered into that something larger, which, never being explained, possessed him with a quiet and true intimation of a state akin to maybe Huck’s deeper sleep indeed. Listen to how Borges, again most beautifully, tells of it, a walk in the moonlight to the neighborhood of Barracas; it’s an old and pleasantly leafy quarter of Buenos Aires (I once wandered around there myself) on the other side of the wide Plaza de Mayo esplanade and its aptly named and very pink presidential palace, the Casa Rosada:

  The evening had no destiny at all; since it was clear, I went out to take a walk and to recollect after dinner. I did not want to determine a route for my stroll; I tried to attain a maximum of probabilities in order not to fatigue my expectation with the necessary foresight of any one of them. I managed, to the imperfect degree of possibility, to do what is called walking at random; I accepted with no other conscious prejudice on my walk than that of avoiding the wider avenues or streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. However, a kind of familiar gravitation led me farther on, in the direction of a certain neighborhood, the names of which I have every desire to recall and which dictate reverence to my heart. I do not mean by this my own neighborhood, the precise surroundings of my childhood, but rather its still mysterious environs: an area I have possessed often in words but seldom in reality, immediate and at the same time mythical . . . My progress brought me to a corner. I breathed in the night, in a most supreme holiday from thought. The view, not all that complex, seemed simplified by my tiredness. It was made unreal by its very typicality. The street was one of low houses and though its first meaning was one of poverty, its second was certainly one of contentment. It was humble and enchanting as anything could be. None of the houses dared open itself to the street; the fig tree darkened over the corner; the little arched doorways—higher than the walls—seemed wrought from the same infinite substance of the night.

  And there he does find a certain sense of timelessness, unexplained because, again, it can’t be explained. Nevertheless, this state of mind is very true, even to the point of being what he calls a “feeling in death,” not in any frightening way but instead in some underlyingly perceptive way, revelatory, with a personal deliverance beyond the trivialities of the mundane; it’s as if his own everyday life, like that of Huck on the raft, has been fragile and illusory, a mere glimpse, until he finds himself easing out of it and delivered back into a realm of those deeper waters, returning at last into an ultimate essence, if you will.

  The other writer I spoke of earlier, Louis Aragon, builds on this kind of experience and explores it in depth with 200 pages of probing meditation in his 1926 Le Paysan de Paris (Paris peasant). For my own purposes here, Le Paysan de Pari
s might bring the argument into better focus, as it takes it back to the Paris that I myself have been thinking about. In fact, my time there that summer was spent mostly in the same part of the city that had provided a territory for considerable thoughtful exploration by the surrealists of the 1920s, including Aragon and also André Breton, the latter in what is today surely the best-known surrealist prose text of the period, Nadja; intensely autobiographical, Breton’s novel has the protagonist, the author himself, repeatedly gravitating in his frequent long walks toward the Grands Boulevards and, more specifically (and a little spookily for me), to the very neighborhood where I was living: “Meanwhile, you can be sure of meeting me in Paris, of not spending more than three days without seeing me pass, toward the end of the afternoon, along the Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle between the Matin printing office and the Boulevard de Strasbourg.”