A HAGGARD GUY LIKE ANY IRISHMAN COMES OUT and tightens his bathrobe at the door, listens to the gendarmes, okay, leads me into the room next to the desk which I guess is where guys bring their girls for a quickie, unless I’m wrong and taking off again on joking about life—The bed is perfect with seventeen layers of blankets over sheets and I sleep for three hours and suddenly they’re yelling and scrambling for breakfast again with shouts across courtyards, bing, bang, clatter of pots and shoes dropping on the second floor, cocks crowing, it’s France and morning—
I gotta see it and anyway I cant sleep and where’s my cognac!
I wash my teeth with my fingers at the little sink and rub my hair with my fingertips wishing I had my suitcase and step out in the inn like that looking for the toilet naturally. There’s old Innkeeper, actually a young guy 35 and a Breton, I forgot or omitted to ask his name, but he doesnt care how wildhaired I am and that the gendarmes had to find me a room, “There’s the toilet, first right.”
“La Poizette ah?” I yell.
He gives me the look that says “Get in the toilet and shut up.”
When I come out I am trying to get to my sink in my room to comb my hair but he’s already got breakfast coming for me in the diningroom where nobody is but us—
“Wait, comb my hair, get my cigarettes, and, ah, how about a beer first?”
“Wa? You crazy? Have your coffee first, your bread and butter.”
“Just a little beer.”
“A Wright, awright, just one—Sit here when you get back, I’ve got work to do in the kitchen.”
But this is all spoken that fast and even, but in Breton French which I dont have to make an effort like I do in Parisian French, to enunciate: just: “Ey, weyondonc, pourquoi t’a peur que j’m’dégrise avec une ’tite bierre?” (Hey, come on, how come you’re scared of me sobering up with a little beer?)
“On s’dégrise pas avec la bierre, Monsieur, mais avec le bon petit dejeuner.” (We dont sober up with beer, Monsieur, but with a nice breakfast.)
“Way, mais on est pas toutes des soulons.” (Yah, but not everybody’s a drunk.)
“Dont talk like that Monsieur. It’s there, look, here, in the good Breton butter made with cream, and bread fresh from the baker, and strong hot coffee, that’s how we sober up—Here’s your beer, voila, I’ll keep the coffee hot on the stove.”
“Good! Now there’s a real man.”
“You speak the good French but you have an accent—?”
“Oua, du Canada.”
“Ah yes, because your passport is American.”
“But I havent learned French in books but at home, I didnt know how to speak English in America before I was, oh, five six years old, my parents were born in Canada in Québec, the name of my mother is L’Évêsque.”
“Ah, that’s Breton also.”
“But why, I thought it was Norman.”
“Well Norman, Breton—”
“This and that—the French of the North in any case, ahn?”
“Ah oui.”
I pour myself a creamlike head over my beer out of the bottle of Alsatian beer, the best i’ the west, as he watches disgusted, in his apron, he has rooms to clean upstairs, what’s this dopey American Canuck hanging him up for and why does this always happen to him?
I say to him my full name and he yawns and says “Way, there are a lot of Lebris’ here in Brest, coupla dozen. This morning before you got up a party of Germans had a great breakfast right where you’re sittin there, they’re gone now.”
“They had fun in Brest?”
“Certainly! You’ve got to stay! You only got here yesterday—”
“I’m going to Air-Inter get my valise and I’m going to England, today.”
“But”—he looks at me helplessly—“you havent seen Brest !”
I said “Well, if I can come back here tonight and sleep I can stay in Brest, after all I’ve gotta have some place” (“I may not be an experienced German tourist,” I add to think to myself, “not having toured Brittany in 1940 but I certainly know some boys in Massachusetts who toured it for you outa the St. Lo breakthrough in 1944, I do”) (“and French Canadian boys at that.”)—And that’s that, because he says:–
“Well I may not have a room for you tonight, and then again I may, all depends, Swiss parties are coming.”
(“And Art Buchwald,” I thought.)
He said: “Now eat your good Breton butter.” The butter was in a little clay butter bucket two inches high and so wide and so cute I said :–
“Let me have this butter bucket when I’ve finished the butter, my mother will love it and it will be a souvenir for her from Brittany.”
“I’ll get you a clean one from the kitchen. Meanwhile you eat your breakfast and I’ll go upstairs and make a few beds” so I slup down the rest of the beer, he brings the coffee and rushes upstairs, and I smur (like Van Gogh’s butterburls) fresh creamery butter outa that little bucket, almost all of it in one bite, right on the fresh bread, and crunch, munch, talk about your Fritos, the butter’s gone even before Krupp and Remington got up to stick a teaspoon smallsize into a butler-cut-up grapefruit.
Satori there in Victor Hugo Inn?
When he comes down, nothing’s left but me and one of those wild powerful Gitane (means Gypsy) cigarettes and smoke all over.
“Feel better?”
“Now that’s butter—the bread extraspecial, the coffee strong and exquisite—But now I desire my cognac.”
“Well pay your room bill and go down rue Victor Hugo, on the corner is cognac, go get your valise and settle your affairs and come back here find out if there’s a room tonight, beyond that old buddy old Neal Cassady cant go no further. To each his own and I got a wife and kids upstairs so busy playing with flowerpots, if, why if I had a thousand Syrians racking the place in Nominoé’s own brown robes, they’d still let me do all the work, as it is, as you know, a hard-net Keltic sea.” (I ingrained his thought there for your delectation, and if you didnt like it, call it beanafaction, in other words I beaned ya with my high hard one.)
I say “Where’s Plouzaimedeau? I wanta write poems by the side of the sea at night.”
“Ah you mean Plouzémédé—Ah, spoff, not my affair—I gotta work now.”
“Okay I’ll go.”
But as an example of a regular Breton, aye?