Dirt

by Bill Buford

  “Yes,” I said.

  Jessica had been monitoring flights. It was already June. Fares, which had once been reasonable, were now very high. “May I buy us tickets?”

  I told her to wait. I had a new plan.

  That weekend, we sat on a bench against a wall.

  My plan, I said, involves our going to France “as a family” until September and my then staying on afterward “on my own.”

  There was a long silence: that is, a really, really long silence.

  “You stay on in Paris on your own?” she confirmed finally.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I didn’t say Paris.”

  “Or wherever, you go to France…”

  “Lyon. I was thinking that I should go to Lyon….”

  “I don’t care where you want to go. You are not going off on your own while I stay behind and put the boys through their first semester of school by myself.”

  “I’m not?” I braced myself. She’d had a brutal time with the toddlers.

  “No.” She paused. “We’re going together.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re moving to France.”

  “We are?”

  “As a family.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know yet. Go back to work. I’ll figure it out.”

  The exchange was among the most profound and consequential conversations of our marriage.

  * * *

  —

  One immediate problem was the duration. Americans can “visit” France as tourists for up to three months. A longer stay requires a visa, which concerned Jessica.

  I knew this but hadn’t taken it seriously. We’d been in Italy for more than three months and were never told we needed a visa. Dan Barber didn’t have one when he did his internship in France. (“I didn’t even know I needed one.”) Nor did Thomas Keller. (“It was a different time.”) Americans got their French training very quietly.

  “They didn’t have children.”

  True, I said. It was also true that two people in the Citronelle kitchen had gone to France to work, been found out by the police, and given twenty-four hours to leave.

  Our children, she said, should go to bed at night without fearing that they are about to be exiled. “We can’t be in France without a proper visa. Go back to work. I’ll figure it out.”

  She then contacted the French Embassy, which gave me a fright, that she had gone ahead and contacted an official at an institution. It seemed so public and irreversible.

  The next morning, she e-mailed me the forms.

  She phoned. “Are you sitting down?”

  “Too late.”

  “Stay calm. Call me tomorrow.”

  It was a staggeringly fastidious document, confirming every fear and caricature of the bureaucratic French. I looked at the requirements: tax returns, proof of income, net worth, your French bank account (our French bank account?), proof of your French residence, and a declaration of purpose, explaining (in French) why you needed to be in France.

  Three nights later, the French ambassador happened to be in the dining room and ordered a soft-shell crab. The whole kitchen knew about my plans.

  “Don’t fuck this one up,” David said. “This is your future.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, I wrote: “Dear Ambassador, I am a writer and a student of the French kitchen. The soft-shell crab that you ate last night at Citronelle was cooked for you by me. I am wondering if you might be able to help me….”

  To ensure that the letter reached the addressee, I called upon Victor Obadia. Monsieur Obadia, a sales rep for Silver Spoon, a gastronomic-restaurant supplier (bark, bowls that look like Gaudí apartments, and impenetrable postmodern designs that thrusting molecular-gastronomy types covet), was a member of an informal group of foodies who could be found on weeknights having a drink at Citronelle’s pop-up sidewalk café. The ambassador of France was an Obadia client. The dining room at the embassy was famously one of the best, and the least accessible, tables in Washington, D.C.

  The French ambassador never replied.

  But I did get a call from a senior official, a grand-sounding figure with flawless Oxbridge public-school-educated English. He was perplexed, he confessed, by what exactly I wanted the ambassador to do.

  Give my family and me a visa to live in France, I said.

  “I see,” the accent replied. The ambassador does not give visas, the accent said, but it did give me a name, Marc Selosse, and a Manhattan telephone number, for the French Consulate in New York, on Fifth Avenue.

  Selosse was sympathetic and educated and spoke many languages, and wanted to help but only if I understood that he wouldn’t be able to do anything.

  “D’accord?”

  “D’accord.”

  He had lived in New York, he explained, long enough to see that most New Yorkers have no idea that in France people really believed in rules, genuinely, and that everyone has to suffer them equally, and there wasn’t a lot to be done, because there were no exceptions: ever.

  But Selosse was prepared to be my coach and put through our application on an expedited basis.

  This was wonderful news. I thanked him and asked how long it might then take.

  “If you’re very lucky, three months.”

  June. So—visas, if we were lucky, by September.

  “But only if,” Monsieur Selosse added, “and it is a very big if, your applications are perfect.”

  * * *

  —

  Selosse gave us an appointment, ten days hence, to present our applications and supporting documents for the consulate’s approval. I protested the wait—we were in a hurry—but he assured me that I would need the time. “And don’t forget that the financial statements are to be done in quadruplicate, with one for each child.”

  “Of course,” I said. Financial statements for our children, who are not yet three?

  “And your children,” he added, “you have to bring them in, too.”

  “Because they will be interviewed?”

  “No, no, not them. We just need to fingerprint them. It is you who will be interviewed. In French.”

  “I don’t speak French.”

  “It will be a short interview.”

  I got to work. Everything was perfectly, even if excessively, straightforward, except one requirement: We had to prove our residence in France. I had read this requirement in the application and ignored it: How can we, who are applying to be residents, establish that we are already residents? I had friends in Paris. Maybe I could get one to “lend” us an address?

  I phoned Monsieur Selosse.

  “The proof of residence is very important. And you must establish it in the city where you will actually reside.” He mentioned a recent case, a woman who had proved residence in Paris but intended to live in Toulouse. “When she showed up at the prefecture in Toulouse”—a requirement is that you register with the local authority within two months of arriving—“we were immediately notified. ‘This is not correct,’ we said, and we ordered her out of the country.”

  I went back to the instructions. You had to produce a lease or property deed, supported by utility bills with both your name and address. There wasn’t a lot of room for improvisation.

  It was Friday. A week had elapsed. Our appointment was on Monday. I called Selosse, but he didn’t pick up. I left a voice-mail message, and paced. It was five o’clock before he phoned back.

  What had I got myself into? “Do I really have to produce these documents? We don’t live in France.”

  “Yes, you just need to give us a copy of the property deed,” he said, very cheerful. “But make sure that you bring the original.”

  Had he not heard me? “But I don’t have a deed.
I don’t own property in France.”

  “Oh. Well, then, you’ll need your lease. But make sure that you bring the original.”

  “But I don’t have a lease.”

  “Oh.”

  “We are not residents.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a long pause. I wondered: Does this mean we give up?

  “If a Lyonnais family is prepared to accommodate your family,” Selosse said, “make sure that they produce all the normal documentation. They also need to cite, in writing, the name of every member of your family, including your children.”

  I hadn’t mentioned a Lyonnais family. “Every name?” I asked, playing along.

  “Every name.”

  Was Monsieur Selosse, a professional diplomat, diplomatically suggesting a fix?

  But who to call? It was a summer Friday, late. Should I rearrange our Monday meeting? Selosse had warned me that there wouldn’t be another appointment until August, which was useless, because all of France would then be on vacation, so that effectively there wasn’t anything until September.

  I concentrated: Do I know anyone in Lyon?

  No. I had never been to Lyon.

  Do I know anyone from Lyon?

  I might know someone, even though I scarcely knew him. The French chef Daniel Boulud. He is famously from Lyon.

  I had met him. Would he remember me? I called the restaurant.

  No, he wasn’t there.

  I pressed.

  He was out of the country.

  I pressed.

  He was in Shanghai.

  (Shanghai? Shit.)

  I recalled an e-mail press release from Daniel’s publicist, Georgette Farkas. She was worth a try. I called, no reply (was she in Shanghai, too?), left a message, then wrote a desperate e-mail, telling her what I needed, the various “proofs”—residency, ownership, the names of our children (“and Frederick is with a ‘ck,’ not the French way with only the ‘c,’ because there can’t be a misspelling”)—and asked: Could she possibly reach Daniel in Shanghai?

  In the morning, a three-page fax was sitting on the rack of my machine, not from Shanghai, but from Lyon.

  I called out to Jessica. “Hey, read this.”

  It described an ancient residence, with many rooms, large enough to accommodate George, Frederick, Jessica, and me, in the grandest, most ancient arrondissement in Lyon. Unfortunately, the property had been in the family so long that no one had been able to locate the original property deeds. Would this testimony suffice? It was signed Julien Boulud.

  “Who is Julien?” Jessica asked.

  “I have no idea. Daniel’s father? But look at the description. Do you think we could live there?”

  “Of course not. It doesn’t exist. It’s made up.” She gave me a puzzled, “How have you managed to survive on the planet so far?” look. “Daniel’s father didn’t write this. You believe that’s his signature?” (Boulud later confirmed that he and his sister drafted the document, but I continue to believe that the house is where we ought to be living today.)

  We showed up for our appointment, our piles of supporting documents, in quadruplicate, pulled behind me in a Radio Flyer red wagon, last year’s Christmas gift, and turned them in.

  Passportlike portrait shots were taken, a payment made (99 euros times four—then about $575), and the documents examined by Monsieur Selosse. He raised his head. “Congratulations,” he said, “it is perfect.”

  It had worked. We would be in France in September. Probably. Maybe.

  Three weeks later, Selosse phoned. An administrator had spotted a mistake, committed by a cashier (who had written “Frédéric,” not “Frederick”). The applications were being returned to New York. Could we come back to the consulate on Thursday? “And please bring your children. They will need to be photographed.” Again? Really? “They’re children. They may have changed. And the recent financial statements.”

  We completed our second set of applications. We obviously would not be in France by September.

  But then—with unexpected efficiency (midway through the August vacances)—our visas came through. We jumped in the air with grateful glee, took the subway uptown, bounded up the stairs, collected our passports, and stared wondrously at the ornate full-page French visa stamped inside. We’d done it!

  And then, like that, I was going to throw up.

  I had been so caught up in the applications frenzy that I hadn’t considered what we might do if they succeeded. Frankly, I had become so convinced that we would have to slink into the country, bluffing our way past immigration officials, that I was now intimidated by the utter orthodoxy of our plan, that we were legitimately moving to Lyon.

  And what a thought: Lyon! Because I still hadn’t seen it. I didn’t have any better sense of it than I had when David first proposed it, except that (now) I had heard it maligned by English friends (“ugly city”) or read dismissals of it by postwar food writers (like Waverley Root, who hated it, or Roy Andries de Groot, who hated it even more). Jessica, ever upbeat, showed me an aerial photo illustrating how the city had been created by two great rivers’ coming together, the Saône (flowing south from Beaujolais) and the Rhône (flowing west from the Alps), and how the heart of the city was almost like an island, “which is why it is called Presqu’île, which means ‘almost an island,’ and looks a little bit like a mini-Manhattan, no?”

  I stared. No. It doesn’t look like Manhattan. It looks far away.

  * * *

  —

  Jessica, undeterred, planned a reconnaissance long weekend in what she was confident would be our new residence, telling the boys only at the last minute, three weeks short of their third birthday and one week before they started school, that their parents were going to France, but not why (such is the innocent bewilderment of toddlers that they had never once asked about the many visits we made to a place called “the Consulate”). On the Thursday afternoon before our nighttime departure, I took them both to a park, allowing Jessica to pack without interruptions, and young George fled to a playground and Frederick sat by himself on a bench, and could sense the agitation and wouldn’t be budged from his seat, and searched my face for clues, and was uneasy and needy and tender, and I was moved by his unexpressed pathos, and felt, unexpectedly, the responsibility, like walking always with a heavy backpack, of having a family, and the misfortune that its fate was so often in the out-of-control control of my erratic self. (Young George, meanwhile, was flying facedown on a slide, screaming with hysteric oblivion.)

  Jessica booked us a room at Le Royale, a hotel that seemed to be patronized by businesspeople, and she liked that: We were there to work, we weren’t vacationing, and she wanted people we met to know we were. We had appointments: a broker (for an apartment), a bank, an agency, “Only Lyon,” recommended by Georgette Farkas that helps foreign businesses get settled; and Marc Veyrat, which involved our spending a night away, at the foot of the Alps, on Lake Annecy, in the rooms above his restaurant.

  * * *

  —

  We arrived on a Friday morning, at the Aéroport de Lyon–Saint-Exupéry, named after the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry of Little Prince fame (which is a children’s book, or an adults’ book that children like, or an adults’ book about childhood, and, in any event, a very good book). I found myself musing about other airports that had been named after writers, and couldn’t think of one (even Chile would reject an effort to name theirs after the poet Pablo Neruda), and I liked the fact that the airport of our new home was literary.

  Waiting for our bags, and in a condition of heightened watchfulness, I studied faces with the exacting eye of an anthropologist who had just landed at a potentially hostile outpost. The women were beautiful, as you would expect—it was France. It was the men who were unexpected. Their look was almost uniform: blunt, short-cropped hair, unshaven, sometimes a che
ek scar, thuggish—ugly: forthrightly so. These were not New York faces. They were not Parisian. They were more English than French, an aging-lad look. I thought: I know these people. They are not fancy or fussy, and they unexpectedly put me at ease. Maybe I can make this place my home.

  At a taxi stand, we spotted the Alps, distantly, a rugged eastern horizon. In the other direction was the city; and, in between, farms, including the one where Daniel Boulud grew up and from where, on a visit to see his parents, he wrote his fraudulent testimony. I felt grateful to him all over again.

  The hotel was on the unnervingly vast Place Bellecour. We ventured out to the middle of it, trying to take in the expanse of the place, the largest open-air square in Europe: unadorned red clay, a distant perimeter of green trees, an immense blue sky. It looked as though a desert had been plopped down where people would normally build homes. Napoleon paraded troops on it. And lo and behold: a plaque commemorating the birthplace of the author of The Little Prince, only a few doors down from where we were staying.

  We phoned our children (and Frederick said uncannily, “I dreamed you were somewhere red and green”). I looked east and spotted the wide river Rhône. I looked west and, voilà, there was the Saône, and on the other side a steep, mountainlike ascent of pastel-colored sixteenth-century buildings, reminiscent of the Arno in Florence. I would learn later that the buildings were in “Vieux Lyon”—Old Lyon—and date from the Italian Renaissance (a century before the French version), and remind you of Florence because they had been built by Florentines. Near the top of the mountain was a diminutive replica of the Eiffel Tower—built in a late-nineteenth-century moment of civic self-doubt, an explicit imitation of the real Eiffel Tower, in the hope that Lyon’s, too, might attract tourists. (The tension between Paris and Lyon is historic, at some times deadly.) Lyon’s tower, alas, is dinky in comparison to the Eiffel, and no one came, and now it houses a radio and cell-phone antenna.