The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  2.

  What can startle you on a weekday afternoon is the sheer number of black limousines and executive town cars, chauffeur driven, in a pocket of the city like that. There are the usual posh apartment buildings, some baroque-trimmed and some more modern, and then the new offices, glass-and-steel high-rises, but on a scale much smaller than those in the heart of midtown. In fact, away from the main avenues, all of it contributes to a distinct eeriness, and maybe a certain calm, too, being so empty; the air smells half of damp masonry and half maybe the imagined aroma of tobaccoey leaves turning— imagined because it surely can’t waft from the few scrawny sycamores planted in the neatly tailored sidewalk and ringed with fan-patterned, rather Parisian grates, their thin leaves uniformly gold. The street is shadowed and cool, but looking straight above, you see a sky that seems enameled, so blue you think that somebody is maybe trying to trick you and no sky is that blue. And along the no-parking-zone curbs, and in the alcoves for the stilled parking ramps where a day’s parking can easily cost you nearly what you would pay for a decent motel room in any other American city, are the big cars. Some of them are genuine stretch models, Cadillacs with tinted windows and chrome grilles that manage to grin every Cadillac’s richness and confidence and sense of superiority. Others are boxy Lincolns that, even without being stretched, offer an evening-carriage coziness, what makes them very good limousines indeed, and others are the inevitable Mercedes, the three-pointed star on the hood; to look at a Mercedes with that glossy, rock-hard enamel it has and the particular craftsmanship in the way the seams along the fenders and trunk blend so tightly, almost invisibly, is to know why the Germans for years made the best binoculars, the best cameras as well. True, it is a street of limousines. And in almost every one, there is sure to be a chauffeur sleeping. Because these are the men in dark suits whose job by definition is probably more waiting than driving, and how lucky they are to be dozing soundly in the sun-fading afternoon. So, you do walk along Fifty-eighth Street, and there are the parked cars of the many chauffeurs sleeping, the windows on the driver’s side rolled down. They appear entirely content in their slumber, and it is enough to make you ask yourself when you yourself last had a night’s sleep that was really deep, for theirs is wonderful sleeping; it is as if to sleep would be to be sure of everything that you were always very much unsure of, would be to know the atomic weight of all the elements on the ancient wall chart at school and to know the important poetry contained in the very names of the different clouds, cumulonimbus, or better, cirrostratus. In one car a chocolate-com-plexioned man in a gray suit leans his handsome head against the leather rest atop the seat, and close to him as you pass, you feel that you almost know what he is dreaming. Or you know the dream of the Latino man with a pockmarked face and dark sunglasses in another car, who isn’t in New York City at all anymore. He is walking as a child down a red-dirt road in one of those Caribbean villages with a whispering name, San Pedro de los Caballeros or La Barranca; there in a tiny house of white stucco and a crumbling terracotta roof, the bougainvillea cascading, his brother, who died very young, is still strong and alive, his grandmother, who raised the two of them, is waiting there, too, able to tell him at last about his father, the stevedore he never knew, tell why his mother ran away with a Trinidadian fisherman not long after that, and how in her heart of hearts, the beautiful young mother didn’t mean to abandon two young sons to be raised (lovingly, nevertheless) by their grandmother. It would be something like that, because sleep as sound as all these men are sleeping can only generate flowering benevolence, can only heal. But then you move on, leave the dreaming chauffeurs. You head back down Ninth Avenue in the warmth and you feel at last ready to return to the roomy subleased apartment you have taken for a few months while staying in New York, a place on West Fifty-fifth, where you wrote well that morning.

  Return there to read, even write a few paragraphs more of the new short story, before dinner later on.

  2000, FROM CREATIVE NONFICTION

  PLASTICIZE YOUR

  DOCUMENTS:

  WITH G. FLAUBERT

  IN TUNISIA

  Time is a tyranny to be abolished.

  —FROM A PARISIAN MANIFESTO

  1. The Whole Idea

  Seeing that the whole idea of the trip this time, going to Tunisia, is to meditate some on Flaubert and hopefully get a feel for an Arab world country to use in some of my own fiction I’m working on, I check over again what I’ve selected for books to bring.

  2. Books; or, the Implements of Travel

  ** A Penguin Classics paperback of Flaubert’s Salammbô, to reread. It’s a novel often seen as the odd offering in his oeuvre, a lushly written near epic about ancient Carthage that has been controversial since the day it was published in 1862. I had some trouble finding a copy here in my home base of Austin, Texas, and with drives to the endless malls connected by the endless looping freeways, a configuration that defines sprawling Austin, I would go into another Barnes & Noble or Borders. At the “F” section in fiction I’d always hit a lot of Fannie Flagg but not much Gustave, outside of Madame Bovary, anyway. But I “scored”—that’s the way it felt by that point—this Penguin Classics edition at a Borders far north in the subdivisioned city at last, translated by a certain A.J. Krailsheimer. It has a buff-and-black cover bearing the insert of an oil painting of a naked, flowing-haired young woman in a chamber of variegated marble pillars, a large flat-headed serpent upright like a cane beside her. The image is identified as being taken from “La Scène du Serpent” by Gaston Bussière, and doubtless it’s Salammbô herself, the ethereally beautiful Carthaginian princess.

  I tell myself it will be easy enough to pick up a cheap paperback of the book in French in Paris, where I will stop for a few days to see friends before going on to Tunis.

  ** This one deals me some sadness, an edition of Saint Augustine’s Confessions printed in 1962. The small, mass-market-sized paperback has a cover like a stained-glass window, with an introduction by a Jesuit. The sadness is not in the 45-cent paperback itself with flaking yellowing pages, but how when I open it I see a signature in pencil on the title page. The signature is that of Ann McCabe. It’s a name I haven’t thought of in maybe forty years and who I now remember as my second oldest sister’s roommate at the supposedly posh Order of the Sacred Heart college in a Boston suburb (the Kennedy girls were products of Sacred Heart boarding schools and colleges), an institution now long defunct. I knew the Saint Augustine was somewhere around my apartment in a box of accumulated books, and I found it and decided to take it along because he talks of being educated in Carthage when it became a Roman metropolis; Carthage, actually, was the city of Saint Augustine’s debauchery as a university student before his eventual reform. The book’s connection with my upcoming travel isn’t all that great, but, more practically, it’s probably the only thing I have on hand—besides the travel guides I’ve bought—that has much to do with Tunisia, site of ancient Carthage. And that signature, a boxy girl’s script: to see it—stare at it, really—conjures up all those sadnesses commonly associated with Time somehow represented in smug personification, inevitably and brutally passing without giving a damn about anybody else. I think about how a girl—toothy and scrub-cheeked, with a blond pageboy haircut, the way I seem to remember her from weekend visits with my sister to our home—was once forced by the ritzy nuns to plow through a book like this that she didn’t particularly want to plow through, and what a task, an ordeal, it must have been for her. And what does any of that matter today, several decades later? I wonder if Ann McCabe is even alive today, something that certainly never crossed my mind before. My sister and I see each other only infrequently, due to geography (more sadness, because she is so dear to me), and I don’t remember her mentioning Ann lately.

  ** I also photostat some pages from Francis Steegmuller’s two-volume Letters of Flaubert, specifically the few that Stee-gmuller includes from the quick fact-finding tour to Tunisia Flaubert launched out on in April 1858;
that trip is not to be confused with his more extensive travels some years earlier with fellow writer (and photographer) Maxime Du Camp, journeying through the Middle East proper. The letters from Tunisia don’t give much info, but there is still a very raucous Flaubert, the incorrigible roué sampling prostitutes in the Medina and waking up the whole neighborhood with the racket of his sport, then going at his research out at the ruins of Punic Carthage—not far from Tunis—for fourteen hours a day; he bounces along on a flea-bitten mule in the heat, picks scorpions out of his sleeping roll at night, and loves every minute of it.

  3. Two Versions of Academia

  Also, besides gathering the books to bring, I figure I might tap some resources at U. of Texas where I teach—do some prep, if you will, by seeking out faculty in the field for tips, more reading suggestions, etc., which doesn’t prove much help, as it turns out. A cheery, crew-cut guy, middle-aged, in a sport shirt and Bermuda shorts in the linguistics department—he has a travel poster of a white Tunisian village on his office door, is an authority on Arabic—invites me in while he pokes a plastic fork at a takeout lunch in a styrofoam box; he explains to me that Tunisia has been his obsession since he first left the Midwest and went there as a Peace Corps volunteer years ago. He talks to me of hotels as well as the pluses and minuses of bus versus train for getting around in the country, then produces a guidebook that I already have, shows me various cities on the map (I pretend the book is new to me); the guy is more than friendly. Next I phone a newly appointed younger assistant professor in the French department. I’ve been told she’s the current authority at UT on North African literature in French; she’s from France herself, has taught in Tunis. On the phone, she sounds serious and so sincere, the way assistant professors can sound so sincere, and in a soft, French-tinged voice she just keeps going on and on with some academic jargon describing a book on harems she used for a class she taught and how it emphasizes the significance of “the gaze” (the word is “in” lately with scholarly critics, I know); I find myself looking at my watch, wondering when the talk will end. I might be somebody who, luckily, snuck into academia by the back door as a creative writer, with no credentials other than my own very small pile of published fiction to qualify me, yet I know I learned my lesson early: I seldom—but that doesn’t mean never—get much of anything genuinely important when asking a “colleague” (even though I use it myself, I dislike that word, its pomposity), or scholarly ones, anyway. That includes either of the two standard types represented here: the benevolent, happy-go-lucky Elks Club variety like the linguistics citizen or the diligent, eternal-grad-student variety like the woman in the French department caught up in “the gaze.”

  Not to say that both didn’t seem essentially good, well-intentioned people, as most academics are.

  4. Still More Sadness

  Starting out for North Africa, I first put in a few days, alone, at what’s left of my family’s old summer place on the ocean in Narragansett, Rhode Island, then a few days more in Paris, where I have taught a couple of times and still have those close friends.

  In Narragansett I walk around the land out on a grassy point, assess the most recent winter damage to the ramshackle (approaching tumbledown) wood-shingled white house with a lot of bedrooms that my father built for our family not long after the war. I hack down some of the grass with a sputtering rusted rotary lawnmower then go at the shrubs with hand clippers to at least make the place look reasonably presentable for another season, losing myself in the sheer exhaustion of the physical work in the blowy sunshine of late May; most of the neighboring houses are still closed for the winter. I try working on my own fiction, but realize I need a longer uninterrupted stretch for that. I get a book on Delacroix (a contemporary of Flaubert, with many of the same interests, I figure) at the little town library in Narragansett. And at night when the fog has set in, the horn at Beavertail Light moaning from across the bay, I find myself reading it while sitting in the crack-walled living room with its faded Winslow Homer prints and clamshell ashtrays, there in the big maroon leather chair that was the favorite of my father, a lawyer and a judge whose lifelong heroes were Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt—for the last of these he proudly cast his own vote in the Electoral College while a member of the Democratic State Committee as a young man. Placing a cardboard coaster as a marker in the pages, I think of how happy all of us were when I was young and we spent summers here, an ongoing carnival that usually included packing the house with freeloading friends of my sisters and mine from school and college, all the serious croquet and all the boisterous big meals at the dining table, that sort of thing. But most everybody in my immediate family is either dead now or not interested in the place much at all anymore. I also think of Flaubert, and though I surely “ain’t he,” as they say, I can’t help but remember that he was a middle-aged bachelor still staying and writing at what amounted to his own family’s country retreat at Croisset on the Seine near Rouen, the oddball in the clan, and maybe old J.-P. Sartre was right to call him, yes, “the family idiot.”

  In Paris I book into a noisy but cheap hotel. It’s not far from the slim pillar topped with the freshly gilded angel at the Place de la Bastille, a neighborhood where I once lived.

  It’s also not far from an apartment Flaubert kept in Paris as a pied-à-terre for use while in the city from Normandy, after he wrote Madame Bovary and when maybe he was working on Salammbô: 42, Boulevard du Temple. I take a walk over there. The building is a recently sandblasted, buff-stone Parisian rise with ornate trim and glossy blue doors; there’s, oddly, a row of modern motorcycle showrooms nearby. Technically part of the Marais, the area is today thoroughly renovated and yuppified, but the basic look of Flaubert’s building probably hasn’t changed much since he made his seasonal visits to the city from Normandy. He came for admittedly pretty heady literary and high-society company, a routine quite different from that when he was writing without interruption in the legendary near solitary confinement of Croisset; that part of his life prompted Baudelaire to describe him as an artistically dedicated “monk” rather than any family idiot. Studying the building, I tell myself you have to hand it to the French, the way they have preserved Paris; also, I like to think again that possibly some work on Salammbô itself was, in fact, done right here, only yards away from where I’m standing.

  One academic acquaintance who has told me many very important things over the years is Claude Lévy, the leading Saul Bellow scholar in France. He’s a handsome, rather dashing character, a man older than me and recently retired, whose wife is a professional opera singer. He was my chairman when I taught at Université Paris X-Nanterre, on exchange, and one evening on this trip, in the honey twilight that lingers until almost ten in Paris in June, I go with him to listen to his wife sing, her getting top billing in a concert on Île Saint-Louis; the three of us have lunch the next day at their apartment. He actually grew up in the small Jewish community in Tunis, leaving to study at the Sorbonne when eighteen. At lunch, there comes a moment over the good, bloodily rare roast beef and the good, grapi-ly tart red wine and the good—very good—conversation and laughing, when he turns more serious, admitting that he hasn’t been back to Tunisia for years. Today it’s no place for a Jew, Claude says, but he asks me to do something for him. He says that when he was kid in Tunis, his aunt had a little summer house on the shore just north of the city at La Goulette-Vieille, and he talks of how happy he was spending school vacations there. He seems a bit lost to remember it, treading water in his own reminiscing sadness, as lost as I was back in my family’s summer place in Rhode Island. (Why do summer places do this to people, even a guy like me who can barely afford my share of the sky-high taxes on mine and am constantly railing about how it chews up a big chunk of my modest teacher’s paycheck? Why do summer places bring this out in people?) He explains that the little commuter train that leaves downtown Tunis and crosses Lake Tunis, a large inland saltwater lagoon, then goes up the coast to suburban Carthage, has a stop at La
Goulette-Vieille. As he speaks, his lovely opera-singer wife Lisa, younger, just silently looks at him, and it is a look that says she has seen this sadness in him before—this expression of utter loss.