Sometimes it’s not only acceptable, but good to steal. For example, when you have been riding your bike up a hill for two hours and there is something wrong with the derailleur and it click-click-clicks, and you stop about two hundred times to put the chain back on, and there is nothing in your body except day-old bread and allergy medicine…then, when suddenly the landscape swoops and flattens into endless rows of cherry trees, then stealing is good. You eat until your belly hurts and ride away, spitting pits.
Biking here in Provence, I finally reach the hill peak and then everything is coasting, winding downward. I am so tired I think I have no breath left to lose but I’m wrong. Below me fields and fields open up and start to spread – mostly vineyards and some tall grainy grass. From so far above, the fields seem stitched together at odd angles like some huge, wonderful accident in patchwork.
The air moves in piney torrents and some space in my head seems to open. Maybe the allergy medicine starts to work. I smell sun-heated. I smell like dirt. For a week there’s been dirt under my fingernails and dirt between my sheets. How did it get there? Don’t know. Can’t ever get clean. It’s a relief to lose that responsibility.
The other morning we de-snailed the entire field of sour berry bushes and thirty minutes later they were back. I thought of Sisyphus and his rock. Claire asked if we were tourists and I said No, but now we’ve left Provence just as the lavender was opening, and we’re staying in Paris, and the answer is different here.
I think about what it means to be a tourist, and Sallie teaches me the French for memory –souvenir. I grew up hating tourists, those people with such a startling lack of awareness and belief in their own entitlement, always asking Where are the toilettes in bad accents. They were playing at making a pilgrimage, but all with false reverence. Everything was a spectacle, some stupid half-conscious parade on to one event and then the next to take a picture and consult the guidebook, all to say We can check this off our list. What now?
We saw probably a dozen guide-book places today, and at first everything was beautiful and new, a whole city unexplored. I have so many words describe Paris, and they’re all not quite right. The buildings press together beneath a low sky, everything lovely, a poster. It’s something like losing your depth perception, a flatness about the city, but not in feeling. I think about Hemingway saying something like The only question was where to be happy.
But by afternoon I have museum legs and maybe I saw that famous cemetery or maybe I didn’t, but seriously, who cares about visiting Sartre’s grave? What does one do at Sartre’s grave? Are you supposed to be sad, or have a moment of existential meditation, or just feel self-conscious that Sartre’s grave has become another stop along the line of tourist kitsch, and you bought it? Is it on the list of one of the things you have to do to earn a badge that says Look at me! I’m cultured!
We are staying with Bridgette, Claire’s connection, a woman who insists on keeping us full of fresh apricots and nectarines and cheese. I don’t know how old she is, but old enough to be retired. She’s beautiful, and it’s not the kind of beauty that you think – oh, I bet she was beautiful when she was young. It’s now, and it’s in her face, her accent, the way she gently mocks us for our hyper-politeness. She gives us wine and sends us out into the night. It’s cold. All the people pressed together in the streets and even the streets themselves feel full of some vague longing. When we walk home the city din sounds far away, but sharp gusts of wind snap twigs like bones. The moon looks as though it’s about to burst over the Seine.