The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  The interest starts even before you enter, with the realization that the lettering on the library’s permanent signage uses the same typeface as most of Gallimard’s publicity material. An accident, a string pulled on some committee in the Mitterrand years? Who knows, but it does speak to the publisher’s quasi-official stature. It makes the national library itself look like an accessory of the Pléiade. The show opens with a room of photographs, a Murderers’ Row of the house’s writers: Proust and Camus and Céline, Marguerite Yourcenar and Romain Gary and the firm’s newest Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa. There’s a vitrine with some famous manuscripts—Le Deuxième Sexe, Les Faux-Monnayeurs—and then in the next room a wall displays some of the firm’s reader’s reports. Many of these are on works first written in English, and some of them are signed by names as distinguished as those on the spines of the books themselves; that for Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa is by Raymond Queneau. Meanwhile Ramon Fernandez advises rejecting Gone With the Wind—only to be overruled by Gaston Gallimard himself, who winkled it away from another publisher when a dinner party conversation made him realize what a hit it would be. The editors tried out dozens of titles for it—En plein vent? Aller au vent?—before settling on Autant en emporte le vent, and when the film was released under that name in France the firm made the producers acknowledge its copyright.

  Gallimard does many things, kids’ books and detective novels and a series of heavily illustrated travel guides, marvels of book production that Knopf publishes in translation; one room shows the mock-up for a multipage foldout that depicts the belts of cultivation along the Nile. There are walls of advertising posters and dust jackets, and bookcases displaying the house’s various lines, like the Folio series of paperbacks, their design as unmistakable as a Penguin but printed more crisply and on better paper too. For someone of my own obsessions the most interesting things here are the bits that define Gallimard’s long history of publishing Faulkner. It began with a 1931 letter from the Princeton French professor Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, who was then busy translating A Farewell to Arms. He gave a brief progress report on the Hemingway and then followed it with two typed pages on his prolific new discovery. Gallimard released Sanctuary in 1933 and As I Lay Dying the next year, but Faulkner himself didn’t get to Paris until 1951. A framed letter here records his thanks for the firm’s hospitality in good though stiff French. “Tout le monde doit bien aimer la France,” he writes and then adds that in Mississippi there’s now someone who loves it just a little bit more.

  Tout le monde. The phrase reminds me of something Jefferson is alleged to have said—that everyone has two countries, his own and France. Would I go that far myself? I don’t know, and yet there’s one crucial aspect of our national life that I can experience more fully here than now seems possible in America itself. Videocassettes and DVDs have long ago killed off the revival movie houses in which I spent so many grad school hours—have killed them everywhere but in Paris, where on most days the cinemas around the Rue des Écoles give me a choice of half a dozen old American movies. The screens are on the small side, but you still watch in the dark with other people, as you were meant to. Schools in France let out early on Wednesdays, and so that’s where my daughter and I are apt to spend the afternoon, sitting in front of Notorious or Stagecoach or Top Hat, sitting at home only and precisely because we are also abroad.

  KENAN TREBINCEVIC

  The Reckoning

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  AFTER READING AN ARTICLE on Bosnia’s tourism boom, my brother, Eldin, and I decided it was time to face down our past. We reasoned that we were really doing this for our seventy-two-year-old father, Senahid. If he didn’t see the country of his birth or his childhood friends soon, he never would. Yet within days I became obsessed with creating a to-do list for our trip: 1) Take a picture of the concentration camp my brother and father survived; 2) visit the cemetery where the karate coach who betrayed us was buried; 3) confront Petra, the neighbor who stole from my mother.

  The minute we stepped out of the car in front of our old apartment building, my hands began to sweat. We fled eighteen years ago, one year into the Bosnian war, and had not been back since. My father’s friend Truly bought our apartment as a summer home in 2006, the year my mom died of cancer. (We were living in Connecticut by then.) Truly and my father both worked with the city’s sports clubs and were close friends for thirty years. “You and your brother should know what your father did for this city and its people,” Truly said when he greeted me. “That’s why he stayed alive.”

  As we approached the building, I could see Truly’s two pretty teenage daughters staring down at us from the third-floor balcony. I was reminded of what it was like to be twelve, shouting to my friends below as I rushed to get to karate practice. It still shocked me to recall that it was my coach who, put in charge of the city’s special-police unit, arrived with the army van to cleanse the building of its Muslims. They marched to our door and told my father, “You have an hour to leave or you will be killed.” We left and went to stay with my aunt. My father and brother were picked up a month later and put into a camp. My mother and I eventually made it back to the apartment, where we were all reunited three months later. We were the only Muslim family who didn’t flee the building when the war began. But we lived in fear that someone would come back for us.

  Inside, the building hadn’t changed—the same impossibly high steps, the same brown mailboxes. Only the tenants’ names were different. After the war, this side of town came to be populated by Serbs. Bosnians like us were now a minority.

  As I walked into the apartment, I headed for my old bedroom. I used to lie on the floor peeping through the tiny holes in the shades that were drawn all day and night so soldiers couldn’t see you and spray the windows with bullets.

  Coming up to our apartment, I passed Petra, our old neighbor. She was in her late sixties now. When she caught sight of me, she put down her grocery bags and sat on the stairs to smoke a cigarette, hoping to avoid me.

  I flashed back to the night she barged into our dining room and told my mother to give her the skirt she was wearing. The next day it was the dining room rug Petra wanted. A week later she invited my mother for coffee, and they sat with their feet resting on the stolen rug. Truly’s wife promised my mother that she would never acknowledge Petra. “All summer long I walk by her as if I’m walking by a grave,” she said.

  Petra liked to tell the paramilitaries where Muslims were living so they could come and cart them away in meat trucks. Her husband, Obren, worked as a guard in the concentration camp. (It was the same one from which my brother and father were miraculously released, as prisoners were being transferred, hours before CNN arrived to show the world the atrocities.) While Petra requisitioned my mother’s things, Obren brought me canned beans and plum jam. He remembered the time my father stood up for him during a tenants’ meeting just before the fighting began. Years later, we learned he died of esophageal cancer. His wife has lasted almost as long as a Galápagos tortoise. The monsters always live.

  As she approached our floor, her footsteps became halting, her breathing heavy. She fumbled for her key. Her eyes didn’t meet mine. “No one has forgotten,” I said. She put her head down. The door opened with a long sigh, then closed. There was silence.

  I heard laughter coming from our old living room and joined my friends inside. Truly turned to his daughters and said, “If the two of you were only a few years older, you could marry one of the boys.” They blushed, smiling. “Once they turn eighteen,” I said, to make them less uncomfortable.

  Later that night I reached into my pocket for my to-do list and crossed off item No. 3.

  BRYAN CURTIS

  The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame

  FROM Grantland

  WHAT DO YOU WANT from Tijuana, my friends? You want to meet a girl? I can take you to the Hong Kong Gentlemen’s Club. I can get you two-for-one drinks. (Actually, I know a guy: three-for-one drinks!) I’ll
show you a white donkey painted with black zebra stripes. The “Dr. House” Pharmacy and other places just out of reach of your copyrights. You want Che Guevara T-shirts, my friends? I Ate the Worm T-shirts? Wet T-shirts? Did I mention the Hong Kong Gentlemen’s Club?

  Me and my pal Eric, in lousy Spanish: “Do you know where we can find the museum of sports? The, um, place of the famous athletes?”

  We do not want sex and drugs from Tijuana. We want to visit the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame.

  I hate to use an itchy word, but Tijuana is dead. Once, Avenida Revolución—the “Revo,” in the gringo tongue—happily excreted pleasure. At age twenty, I walked its grime-covered sidewalks, dodged honors students from San Diego, and nosed into a bar where a stranger unfurled his hand and said, “Amphetamine?” (Nah, I’d stick with tequila.) But as Eric and I cruise the Revo at a nocturnal hour, we see boarded-up storefronts and hear the Proclaimers playing in empty bars. Even the calls of the touts (“Check this out, amigo”) sound halfhearted, like the fight song when your team trails by three touchdowns. Tijuana, after its severed-head period, has entered a mind-bending phase. It’s a gringo viceland without gringos.

  Except, of course, these two gringos.

  Now, about the Hall of Fame: Eric and I aren’t sure it exists. A motel owner, a shopkeeper, and a cabbie haven’t heard of it. They’re not alone. I call Freddy Sandoval, a Tijuana native who played third base for the Angels. “I didn’t know we had a Hall of Fame,” he says. Freddy Sandoval’s picture is in the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame.

  One morning the cashier at Ricardo’s restaurant gives us a tip. We walk up Avenida Madero, past cheapo fast-food joints and auto repair shops. We come upon a triangle of parkland bordered by three noisy streets. A man and his two dogs are passed out in the grass. Another sits on a park bench displaying his tricked-out bike. We see two cops from a police force we have been eagerly trying to avoid. And in the middle of this dingy urban still life, a bell tower that looks like a giant white chess piece rises toward the sky. A hand-painted sign reads, SALóN DE LA FAMA DEL DEPORTE. The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame.

  Balancing on four legs, the Hall of Fame proper begins about three stories in the air. You can walk under the building and gaze up at it. We climb the outer staircase, and the metal bows under our feet. The final step feels like it could give way at any second.

  Eric and I peek through the door. The Hall of Fame is as empty as the Revo. We don’t see any customers—or any employees. We walk inside and sign the guestbook.

  The Hall’s first exhibit, on our right, is an odd photo collage devoted to lucha libre. There are old wrestlers who look like Fidel Castro, and new ones who look like Tijuana’s answer to Doink the Clown. On the left-hand wall, we come across an exhibit marked “Golf.” Only there aren’t any photos of golfers. There are only photos of the exterior of the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame. “Maybe the exhibit is on tour or something,” Eric says.

  Moving tentatively forward, I get interested in a team photo of Equipo Vikingos, the 2000–2001 champions of Tijuana’s amateur baseball league. Los Vikingos, a swell-looking bunch of guys, are celebrating with a well-endowed brunette in a leopard-print dress. What’s confusing is that I can’t find photos of the team that won the amateur title in 1999–2000 or 2001–2002 or any other year. Los Vikingos and their valet, it seems, have been awarded a singular honor. The Hall of Fame is as idiosyncratic as your uncle’s mantel.

  Another mystery photo: grim-faced Maria Hayde Gomez, described only as Tijuana’s 1983 Youth Athlete of the Year. ¿Quién eras, Maria? We see a glass case packed with strange memorabilia: a baseball glove with the name Rudy Campos written on it in marker; a leather jacket from Tijuana’s hunting and fishing club; wrestling trunks; a photo of Esteban Loaiza.

  The Hall bulges with sports history: hundreds of Tijuana men and women stare back at us from neat 11-by-14-inch black frames. There are chess players, archers, matadors. A geriatric woman bowling in brow-line glasses. A high school football team holding aloft its coach, a Mexican John Madden, after a big win.

  The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame has the soul of Canton, Ohio, and the inventory of a wall at Chili’s. We have to know: What is this place?

  Back downstairs in the park, I walk up to a man. I’d picked up a color brochure in the Hall of Fame and located a photo of the director.

  How do I find this man? I ask.

  The man in the park says, “He’s dead.”

  Oh. I point at another man in another brochure. What about this man?

  “He had a heart attack.”

  We’ll try back tomorrow.

  What do we turistas want from Tijuana? Well, first we want vice. Tijuana is our Larry Flynt. During Prohibition, vice was something as simple as getting a beer. Tijuana, Liberty magazine once proclaimed, was the city “Where There Aren’t No Ten Commandments and Where a Man Can Raise a Thirst.” Vice also meant sports.

  In 1907 the mustachioed Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz decreed that gambling was legal here. Tijuana Racetrack was opened less than a decade later by “Sunny Jim” Coffroth, the on-the-make son of a California state senator. (Americans and Mexican politicians were teammates in the creation of Tijuana’s vice culture.) Americans crossed the border and walked a mere 150 yards to get to the track. Members of the clergy put up a sign at the border that read: THE ROAD TO HELL.

  With sports, Tijuana was a clever demon. The horses ran in Tijuana on Sundays, when Santa Anita called such a thing unholy. They ran during World War II, when Santa Anita was a Japanese internment camp. The city’s Agua Caliente Racetrack popularized the “5–10” bet—later renamed the Pick 6—which drew thousands of suckers south in search of a payday.

  The restaurants, hotels, and brothels that grew up around the racetracks and casinos became Tijuana’s main street, later renamed Avenida Revolución, which became—under a few coats of irony—the official vicelandia of the gringos.

  There were stadiums in Tijuana that felt like they were designed by Dr. Seuss. In 1947 an enormous jai alai palace was built on the grounds near our motel. A version still stands with JAI ALAI GAMES in giant letters on the outer wall and a statue of a player holding a cesta out front. A guard lets us inside and we can see that the betting windows have been perfectly preserved.

  When American sports rejected you, Tijuana welcomed you. California’s ban on bare-knuckle boxing led promoters to move a highly publicized 1886 bout just south of the border. Wyatt Earp served as ref. Dennis Rodman, when America tired of him, spent an end-of-the-trail season grabbing rebounds for the Tijuana Dragons.

  If bullfighting is your vice, you can still find a $24 ticket to see bull-slayers like Humberto Flores and Lupita López. Ricardo “Cheto” Torres, who runs a boxing gym downtown, tells us he used to work the bullring in the 1970s. He sold seat cushions to turistas for five bucks. When the crowd threw roses to the matadors, sometimes drunk Americans stood up and threw their cushions.

  In the bullring’s parking lot, we notice a sign: MANAGEMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOUR CAR IS STOLEN, DAMAGED . . . OR CATCHES ON FIRE.

  At the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame the next day, Eric and I are surprised: there’s another visitor. “What in the world are you doing here?” the man exclaims. This is Roberto Montaño, forty-two, who will guide us into the sports-obsessed mind of Tijuana.

  “In Tijuana, baseball is the big thing,” Roberto says. “I grew up as a Padres and Chargers fan.” If you lived in Tijuana, you grooved on America’s sporting vices just like America grooved on yours. Put up an aerial antenna and you could siphon off all the Padres and Chargers games.

  “I grew up with Dan Fouts, Charlie Joiner, and John Jefferson,” Roberto says, “and, on the Padres, Randy Jones and Dave Winfield. I remember when Ozzie Smith came up in 1978 as a rookie shortstop. I remember when the Clippers played in San Diego.

  “I used to watch the Saturday Game of the Week. Joe Garagiola, Tony Kubek, Vin”—he pronounces it Veen—“Scully. My dad, who would be seven
ty-two now, was a Yankees fan. There weren’t any Padres when he was growing up. Basketball wasn’t big in Tijuana unless you were a sports fan like me. I remember Kareem, Magic, Worthy. And the white guy with glasses. What was his name?”

  Tijuana has boxers like Érik “El Terrible” Morales, who keeps a gym in Zona Norte. But, interestingly, twenty years ago Tijuana was not a soccer town. Roberto and old-line tijuanenses will tell you soccer was brought by migrants from the Mexican interior who came to Tijuana hoping to get to the United States. Many got stopped short—it’s a lot harder to cross near Tijuana than it used to be. They began the soccerization process, and satellites beaming in the Champions League did the rest. Tijuana’s home club, the wonderfully named Xoloitzcuintles, just joined the first division of Mexican league.

  We climb into Roberto’s car. He’s on his way to San Diego to go shopping, but he’ll drop us in the red-light district. (My friends! I see you’re back . . .) “Tijuana has grown so ugly,” Roberto says as we cruise down the Revo. “Even in the seventies it was beautiful. Then a lot of outsiders came here to go to the States.” While Americans fear an invasion of immigrants, Tijuana fears an invasion of soccer fans.

  Roberto points down a side street and says, “Can you see the border fence?” We can just make it out, a string of silver tinsel glittering in distant hills. Even with an American passport, the lines to get back can take three hours.

  At about that moment, a bile-raising smell wafts into the car. Roberto’s wife and son cover their faces. “That incomparable Tijuana odor,” Roberto says. “It smells like rotten dog.” It smells a lot worse than that.

  We accelerate down the lonely Revo. Roberto points out a woman walking away from us. “That girl in brown? She’s a prostitute.” Her? “I can tell. Her walk, her face . . .