Take Me to Paris, Johnny

by John Foster

  ‘So where do you want me to go?’

  That was the question I had been dreading. I said nothing and let the storm that I had stirred up break over me.

  ‘I’m not going,’ he yelled. ‘For ten years I had an apartment and they threw me on the street. Ten years! Carajo! Johnny! Do you hear what I’m telling you? I’m not going.’

  He was working himself into a frenzy. He hurled his sewing kit across the room. Tears sprang in his eyes and then, no longer able to contain his wild emotion, he stormed out and slammed the door behind him.

  Well after midnight when the doorbell rang, I got up to let him in. We didn’t speak. He poked about in the fridge looking for something to eat. And then, when he slipped into bed, I knew, despite myself, I was glad that he was back.

  Three weeks later, in my next letter to Rickard, there was the merest echo of our row, and of my capitulation:

  At any moment [I wrote], I’m expecting the phone to ring. At the other end will be my Cuban friend who, in typical New York style, will be ringing to let me know he is about to knock on the door. [Had I still not given him a key?] This odd custom supposedly prevents you getting mugged and at the same time handsomely increases the profits of the telephone company.

  To my great surprise, and despite my frequent fits of wanting to be alone, etc., we are still together. He is patient, persistent and generally nice, and infuriates me—unreasonably—by always reading first any bits of news in the paper about astronauts, missiles and anything else that might be happening in space. I am crotchety, querulous and crabby, but my blue eyes apparently compensate for these defects. Not that I’m even convinced that my eyes are blue; but they are close enough, especially in a city like this where brown eyes must preponderate by a ratio of 90 to 10. Anyway, it’s all very innocent and comfortable for the time being.

  Patience was not normally a quality I associated with Juan. The explanation of it here was simple. One night between the August and September letters he had confided, half apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but I think I’m falling a little bit in love.’ I ignored it as best I could. Being a little bit in love was not much different, I hoped, from being a little drunk. It would pass. It would have to, because I was planning to move on to Germany for the next stage of my research on Hans and Klaus. ‘Although I have the best part of four months left in N.Y.C.,’ my letter to Rickard concluded, ‘I’m beginning to get a kind of itchy-feet end-of-my-stay feeling, which manifests itself in more frequent recourse to the Xerox machine.’ I would soon need to renew my passport but would delay it as long as possible because the cost had gone up to $35. Money was tight. ‘What a mean note for the end of a letter,’ I concluded. There was a PS. ‘The phone rang!’

  For the next few weeks we bracketed out the uncertain future. But already, I remember, Cuba was beginning to permeate our life together with its tastes and moods and extravagances. It appeared in the supermarket trolley in the form of adobo, a spicy mixture of herbs intended to relieve the blandness of my cooking. It came home in the shape of green bananas which, I was informed, were plátanos and which had to be fried and pounded into a flat cake and fried again and sprinkled with salt in precisely the way that Clara de la Rosa had done in the kitchen at Guantánamo. Cuba also dictated that we observe the ritual of a Saturday-night investment in the lottery, and at other times as well if there happened to be a couple of spare dollars in the jar on the mantelpiece. And of course this was perfectly reasonable. Juan had already formed a realistic estimate of the modest income of a junior academic, and how else, he asked me, could we hope to be rich? In his view, riches and success, fame and fortune were largely a matter of luck, and this being the case it was foolish to deny oneself the chance of being lucky. The lottery became an obligation. Failing to buy a ticket was not simply (wilful) forgetfulness on my part; it was moral delinquency.

  In the autumn the pace of the city quickened. The college semester began at Marymount and Juan was immersed in preparing his Debussy-inspired ballet. He rehearsed in the evenings, and I found myself waiting for him to come home, making dinner at midnight, anxious to hear the details of his progress, and as nervous as he was as the day of the show approached. Sometimes, if he was not home too late, we would light the fire and toast marshmallows and drink red wine from the liquor store across the road. The unaccustomed wine made him drowsy, and more often than not, he would fall asleep with his head on my lap. Then, gazing into the fire, I would revert, obsessively, to the undecided matter of our future.

  So often had I circled round this question that I knew by now every move my mind would make, and every counter-move. The more my rational self declared against the prospect of a life together, the more strongly I desired it. And at the back of my mind, whenever I pitched up at this impasse, there flickered the memory of a conversation that had taken place in Melbourne some months before. ‘The trouble with you,’ I had been told by a friend, the way only a friend would say, ‘The trouble with you is that you won’t commit yourself. You won’t let yourself be loved.’ It had been an after-dinner observation and, as such, I could have easily dismissed it. Instead, though without allowing there was any substance to it, I had pressed him to explain his opinion. Why should I refuse what I most wanted? ‘I think you’re afraid of getting hurt,’ he said. Well, perhaps I was; and perhaps there was nothing unusual in that. But how could I tell if what he said were true? Whenever I tried to measure his words against my knowledge of myself, I became confused, and other voices that were in me, other memories, resisted any clear admission of his claim. I was back at the impasse. Only one thing was clear about Juan and me. Here he was, here we were; and we were happy.

  In that autumn semester he also enrolled in a video class. Each student in turn was entrusted with the video equipment for a weekend, and the assignment was to film a happening in the city. When Juan’s turn came, we looked in the ‘What’s On’ column in the Village Voice and discovered that there was, remarkably, nothing much listed except a housing demonstration in Hell’s Kitchen. Compared with Juan’s TV-induced fantasy of filming Diana Ross in concert in Central Park with a cast of thousands, the People’s Coalition for Better Housing was hardly glamorous. He was reluctant to revisit the scene of his own first days in New York; he was apprehensive about his ability to handle the equipment; and he was, justifiably, even more nervous about having enlisted me as his technical assistant.

  After a considerable hike from the subway station, we arrived at the demonstration outside a tenement block that reeked of boiled cabbage and tomcat. There were speeches denouncing Reagan and the city administration and the developers, and then the demonstration formed itself into a motley procession that moved off around the corner of Ninth Avenue, where a black revival meeting was in full cry. At this point Juan discovered that I had bungled the sound recording, which I now belatedly switched on when he was expostulating loudly over the hubbub of the Gospel choir. When this piece of cinema vérité was duly exhibited in class at Marymount, the first sound to be heard was an agitated Spanish-American voice shouting furiously: ‘Carajo, Johnny. I told you to turn on the fucking sound!’ He got a D for technique which we both agreed was my fault, but the grade was redeemed to C+ because, the professor told him, of his social compassion.

  I have one other memory of that November afternoon: the wind. It whipped off the river sharp and mean, and we were glad to step down from the street into the musty warmth of the subway on our way home. Juan was still living out of the bag of summer clothes that he had deposited, and since retrieved, at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. His winter jackets and coat, together with the other things he had saved from the apartment, were still in storage at the warehouse. He had already fallen two months behind with the extortionate rental payments, and until those payments were made they refused him access to his locker. So there was nothing for it but to part with the money, which I did ungraciously, and the prize specimen of Brooklyn manhood in the warehouse office returned the compliment and fl
icked the key at us with venomous contempt.

  We located the locker on the third floor at the end of a long corridor; we heard a dog barking; and there was a flickering fluorescent light that might have been designed to emphasise the overwhelming desolation of this place.

  Juan pulled out the two tea chests. They had both been ransacked. The stereo was gone. The portable TV was gone. A few bits of crockery were smashed. Digging deeper into the muddle of pullovers and jackets, he pulled out two plaster statues, the kind I had seen in botánicas, religious knick-knack shops that sell holy oils and curative herbs and magical candles. The statues had lost their heads. ‘Bárbara and Lázaro,’ he said, and I could see that he was going to cry. He sat down on the concrete floor with the meagre trophies of his twelve years in America strewn about him. Miraculously the fur coat was still there, and I gathered it up and wrapped it round his shoulders.

  I can’t remember exactly when I said that I loved him, but it could have been there in the warehouse, on the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When the German passport official asked him the purpose of his journey, he could have truthfully replied, ‘I’m looking for my homeland and I’ve come to find out if this is it.’

  —Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind

  At the end of February I left for Berlin to continue my work on Hans, Klaus and their family in the German archives. It was a subdued farewell at JFK. When I passed through the departure gate, I knew that he would be heading back into the city with nowhere to go. We had made a couple of efforts to find him an apartment—a room with barred windows on 168th Street and another place at the end of the A-line in Jamaica—but anywhere remotely affordable was so depressing or so dangerous that we gave up in despair. He had enough money for a few nights at the ‘Y’, and after that he would wear out his welcome on the sofa of one friend after another.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Johnny,’ he said. He would get by.

  We had firmly agreed that as soon as the semester was over he would come to spend the summer with me in Berlin. He wanted to believe in this arrangement, but I doubt that he did. If there was anything in New York more familiar than a shattered dream, it was a broken promise. ‘I’ll call you,’ they said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ The usual courtesies of the transient lover already on the lookout for a new adventure, no more than a civilised parting ritual, with not too much fuss. Although he preferred a little more drama in his own disengagements, this, he knew, was the way things end.

  When the cheque for his airline ticket finally arrived, he was elated, ‘like a cat with a dish of cream’, Hiram told me, and I wished I could have seen him like that. His stocks rose in the circle of his Cuban friends, who conceded that there appeared to be something serious in this affair after all. But the cheque was the least of our problems. Transferring money from one country to another is considerably easier than transferring persons, particularly a person like Juan.

  At the beginning of June I intended to be in London to do some business on behalf of the University Library. I suggested to Juan that he buy a return ticket to London and, after a couple of days there, we could travel back together by train to Berlin. This suggestion did not meet with his approval. Paris was still the destination of his dreams. He combed New York searching for a ticket that would take him there, and finally came up with a cheap student flight that would land him in Amsterdam and, at the end of the summer, fly him out on a specified date from Paris. This, he was sure, was value for money; with train trips to London and Berlin, he would stop over in four countries compared with my plan for two.

  Despite these changes, we still planned to meet in London. I was at Victoria Station early on the appointed evening, waiting for the boat train to deliver him from Amsterdam. He was also early, but waiting in mounting anxiety at the Victoria Coach Station, where he had been deposited after a flight to Gatwick. By the time he had discovered the mistake and made his way to the railway station in the care of a London bobby, he was almost hysterical. He was tired, hungry and unforgiving, and his disposition was not improved by a meal in the nearest Wimpy Bar. At the bed-and-breakfast place where we stayed, nylon sheets and soggy toast added to his determined unhappiness. He was impossible; and although I had grown accustomed to his penchant for melodrama, which might have been appropriate to the misunderstanding at Victoria, I was puzzled and distressed at the persistence of his hostile irritability.

  In mid-morning, as I was trying to prise him out of the bedroom, the Life Guard obligingly marched past our window on their way to the Palace. The sheer surprise lifted him out of his surliness and, seizing the moment, we traipsed after the Guard to watch them perform their ceremonial change. With his face pressed against the railings of Buckingham Palace, he hoped that the Queen would appear; and when she did, he would tell her what he thought of her country and her soggy toast and bitter marmalade, though he would have to admit that she had turned on a very good show with the royal wedding twelve months earlier, and he thoroughly approved the way she had put that pert little Nancy Reagan in her place.

  This conversation with the Queen appeared to relax him, and as we walked away down the Mall he began to explain the problem. Americans, as we knew, did not need a visa to travel in Western Europe. But Juan, as I now recalled, was not an American citizen. It was only by chance that he had learned, on the day before he left New York, that he would need a visa for each country he visited. In the last twenty-four hours he had secured an entry permit for Holland and the UK, but for Germany he had no permit.

  We examined his passport. It turned out not to be a passport at all, but simply a permit to re-enter the United States. But in case the possession of this document should give him a false sense of security, or any illusion concerning his place in the world, there was a notice inside that said he shouldn’t take it for granted that they would let him back in.

  Persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanour involving moral turpitude either before or after entering the United States, other criminal, immoral, insane, mentally or physically defective aliens, those afflicted with loathsome or contagious diseases, are subject to exclusion if attempting to re-enter, notwithstanding they may be in possession of permits to re-enter.

  Compared with my own passport, which pompously requested various foreign personages to let me pass without let or hindrance on pain of the Governor-General’s displeasure, this miserable document almost gloated at the possibility of disowning him. He was a stateless person. In a gentler world this condition would have much to recommend it; in the actual world of policed immigration and passport controls, it was at best humiliating and at worst potentially disastrous.

  The next morning we presented ourselves at the German Consulate to apply for the necessary permit. I entered the building first, through a revolving glass door that was guarded on the inside by a couple of terrorist-repellent security men. Juan followed, but when he stepped inside, they body-searched him. Standing beside him in the queue, I could sense him bristle. They were racists, these Germans. Why had they not frisked me? He was right, of course, and I knew it. I tried to pacify him, to brush the incident aside. We had come to get a visa, and there was nothing to be gained by launching the civil rights movement all over again in a German consular office in London.

  The next man through the door was an African, and he too was searched. And so was an Arab-looking gentleman. Then came a European, a white middle-aged business type to whom the guards nodded deferentially as he took his place in the line. Juan exploded.

  ‘Search that man!’ he shouted with such electrifying effect that you would think a gun-toting terrorist had stormed into the lobby. ‘Why don’t you search that man?’ he screamed, jabbing a finger at the businessman who, to my relief, was immediately whisked away to another section to complete his privileged arrangements undisturbed.

  We reached the counter.

  ‘How long do you wan
t?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘Two months.’

  ‘I’m sorry. With this document only two weeks are permitted. Come back in four weeks to collect it.’

  We were stunned. Anticipating a short stay in London, I had brought only a small amount of money with me, and Juan, as usual, had virtually none. We couldn’t tell that to the clerk.

  ‘Does it normally take four weeks to issue a visa?’ I enquired.

  ‘With that document, yes,’ he replied, glaring at Juan as though he were looking for signs of a loathsome disease. ‘He should have applied in New York.’

  ‘But we didn’t know.’

  The official shrugged. That was all. ‘Next.’

  Outside on the footpath we argued.

  ‘You betrayed me, Johnny!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. You sided with those whiteys.’

  It was the first time that colour had ever come between us. Bridling at this accusation and unwilling to acknowledge any guilt, I repeated my line that there was no point in creating a scene if we wanted to get the visa. With a twist of the knife he replied, ‘And did we get the visa?’

  He was being bloody-minded, I told myself. Why should he punish me because of this chance affront? Or, if I conceded that it was not mere chance, how did he expect me to take on the whole colossus of prejudice that this little scene encapsulated?

  ‘That’s just what you would say,’ I could hear him reply. ‘You’re always so cool, so logical, so sure you can work the system. So white! It wasn’t you they treated like a criminal. You didn’t feel a rage so deep inside you that it ran all over your body and made you tremble and scream and look like a madman. No, you just let them do it.’

  I was a whitey. And this England, he reminded me, was my ancestral home. These were my people. When I looked around at those South Kensington faces, freshly flushed with pride at their Falklands victory, I felt no kinship with them. In New York it had not been like this. Only London made me feel really foreign. London, and Juan.