WALKING: ANOTHER ESSAY
ON WRITING

 

1.  Roller Luggage

Both times it had to do with walking, and both in what you might call “other places.” Not so oddly, I guess. In Paris I had been walking for about a half hour already that Sunday afternoon.

I had no real agenda, other than getting out of my apartment in the Marais for a while in the good weather, heading up toward the Place de l’Opéra and the streets behind it with the big department stores. I wanted to see if I could maybe determine where the old Café Certa had been, the spot that figures prominently in what has to be one of the neglected masterpieces of French Surrealism, Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant. I was in Paris for a semester, teaching again at a university there, and at the moment I was immersing myself in a personal project of reading as much as I could Surrealist prose, which overall tends to get sold short at the expense of the movement’s poetry.

I had logged enough long walks around the city already that I knew it was wise to always have a mini umbrella poked into the pocket of my zip-up jacket—in Paris in autumn the weather can often change, dramatically and fast. But this day the sky was so big and blue over the stately buff-stone buildings lining the empty thoroughfare of Boulevard de Magenta, the plane trees showing leaves as fiery as anything in New England, that I soon realized I definitely wouldn’t need it. I probably also realized, or assured myself, that wearing the springy, and basic, black-and-white nylon Reeboks had been a good idea, the essential bounce of them, even if they did look a little goofy. Actually, continuing along, I tugged off the jacket and carried it under my arm, eventually deciding the day wasn’t quite warm enough for that, and when I did put it back on, I spotted the Gare du Nord. Which is when I think it started.

I hadn’t been in the Gare du Nord for a while, so I thought it might be worth taking a swing through it now on this walk. I headed that way.

There was the cluster of cafés and hotels surrounding the station and then the façade of the impressive edifice itself. A central fan window rose almost the height of it, with sculpted toga-clad personages atop the entrance’s long row of heavy swinging doors. (While walking, I suppose that I was thinking of the woman I had been seeing before I came to France. I suppose I was thinking some about my classes, too, there in the university’s stark classroom building over by the Panthéon, the Sorbonne Nouvelle and a different university than the one in Paris where I had been a visiting faculty member years before; I had to teach only once a week, on Fridays. One class was in creative writing, this time delivered in English to sweet, hopeful first-year Anglo-American Studies students whose English really wasn’t very good and who probably weren’t ready for creative writing even in their own language; the other was in the theater department, a class on Tennessee Williams, where the equally sweet and hopeful students, budding actors and actresses, had next to no English for the most part and I often had to resort to conversing in French, despite the departmental powers that be repeatedly telling me that the whole idea was to stay tough and give them only English.) The concourse of the Gare du Nord within stretched enormous, a wide polished floor and the bright afternoon light coming through the lofty glass-and-cast-iron roof providing a pleasant glare to it all, like sunshine on a frozen pond, maybe; automated signs clicking-ly shuffled arrival and departure information. At the deadends of the platform tracks were the sleek, streamlined snouts of the high-speed TGV locomotives repeated one after another, massive silver machines, about a half dozen of them in a line facing that main lobby with its newsstands and coffee counters. And gathered before one locomotive, in the glare and amid a spread-out clutter of all sorts of bags and bulky suitcases, was a pack of young women, chicly dressed and very blond; they were chatting and laughing, occasionally looking up to the schedule announcements above. I told myself they must have been Dutch or Scandinavian—all strikingly blond like that, nearly uniformly so—and, of course, the Gare du Nord does serve northern European destinations.

As I said, it started then, but I wasn’t sure of it yet.

Farther on, it was admittedly strange to be walking through the pocket with the famous Parisian department stores, true Belle Époque landmarks, and seeing the streets thoroughly deserted. I passed the window displays and their many mirrors that tossed back moving images of me, and I even poked around the alleys behind the stores and the scruffy loading docks; it was cooler there in the shadows, but once out in the sun again, walking on the comfortable Reeboks, it became warm again, though not quite as much so now as an hour before when I’d first set out.

Louis Aragon’s 1926 Paris Peasant is a long personal essay, much like a journal, about the author’s life and metaphysical imaginings at twenty-five. In the book, the Café Certa serves as the central meeting place for the group of then relatively unknown young writers and painters who are his close friends, an iconoclastic coterie that began with Dada interests and would eventually be celebrated worldwide as a bona fide movement, the Surrealists. The café also becomes for Aragon, when alone, a good nook for writing. There he works on his poems and essays. He rubs elbows with the habitués from the neighborhood, soon backing their struggle to try to keep the vintage shopping arcade that houses the Certa from being demolished in the name of progress, before it belatedly falls prey to Baron Haussmann’s controversial master plan to rehab Paris that lingered well into the twentieth century. Why, at one point in Paris Peasant, Aragon goes as far as reproducing on the page, as part of the text, an exact facsimile of the café’s cocktail menu, a “Tarif des Consommations,” ranging from (untranslated) the “Kiss Me Quick” and the “Pick Me Hup” and the “Sherry Cobler” (one b) to what seems to be the very special, and undoubtedly extremely dangerous, “Pêle-Mêle Mixture” (prix 2 F.50).

But walking now, it was tough for me to get a bead on exactly where the Café Certa had been, there in the vicinity of the big, open plaza in front of yet another of those full six train stations in Paris, this time the Gare Saint-Lazare. On the city’s western side, it serves the lines going to and coming from the U.K., via the old pre-tunnel ferry connection, and I told myself that the Certa’s menu with its endearing English might have been practical rather than affected when considered in that light, seeing that some of its customers would have been British. However, looking around, going up and down streets between the station and the Boulevard des Italiens, I knew that much had certainly changed, and I realized that many of the buildings were completely different now and sometimes also renumbered, so that for me it wouldn’t be, after all, a matter of at least seeing where the café had once been.

I had looked up the address for the current Café Certa in the Bottin, the hefty Paris phone book, before I left my apartment, and it matched the information that Aragon himself had provided back in 1926. In a footnote he explains that at the time of his completing Paris Peasant the Café Certa was already gone, moved to a “new location” on Rue d’Isly and “near the old London Bar,” though he makes no mention of going there anymore. And on the other side of the station, deep in a nest of more Sunday-empty side streets, I did find the Rue d’Isly and I did see the current Certa. I would have gone in for a coffee, but for me the place looked too neat today, even after so many years of operation in this location— too upscale. There was a pricey dinner menu in the front window, and on the other side of the glass waiters in proper black trousers and crisp white shirts were preparing tables for what might have been the evening’s well-heeled dinner clientele—I understood why Aragon himself had perhaps kept his distance.

And still walking, starting to head back, I knew I was appreciative of the fact that attempting to locate the Café Certa had, if nothing else, given me a destination, a vague reason to get out of my apartment on such a fine October afternoon, to just walk and walk like this. (I possibly thought some more about my classes, thought, too, much more about the woman I had been seeing back home and who had become, well, dear to me.) I looked at my watch, saw that the time it gave was exactly the same as that on the clock atop the Gare Saint-Lazare. I figured I would work my way back to the Marais along the Grands Boulevards, and there would be plenty of cafés en route to choose from if I wanted to take a bit of a rest—which was when it started again.

Or, more so, when it happened.

I waited for the light to turn at sort of a traffic semicircle— devoid of any traffic, it faced the plaza in front of the station, with Gare Saint-Lazare as impressive as Gare du Nord even without the latter’s ornate carved statuary—and I saw what I maybe hadn’t noticed when I had been looking around there only a half hour before. I saw how from all sides of the traffic semicircle people on foot seemed to be converging on the station, not a crowd, but people approaching the station— singly or sometimes in couples—from all directions. It was the end of a weekend, a Sunday with the sunshine beginning to soften and taking on a thick, honeyish hue that made the recently sandblasted Gare Saint-Lazare more golden than it was, also made the colors of the clothing of the people converging on the station from the empty streets—moving in a diminishing fan toward it and then across the paved plaza— yes, those colors more true than they were, too, a red jacket here, a very royal blue one there. Many of them were pulling roller luggage, walking along with suitcases on little wheels with quiet reservation, expressionless, as if it were just so much work they had to do. Everybody returning.

I stared at it all.

I don’t know what it was. It would be easy to say it was a combination of understandably intriguing imagery—travelers at the end of a weekend heading home, not only the lovely contingent of blond young women in the Gare du Nord standing around in front of the long-snouted futuristic locomotives, a scene that was pretty wondrous in itself, but travelers from everywhere seeming to have materialized from all the deserted streets of Paris now. And there was that clock high on the station’s topmost gable at the head of the sloping plaza, its sizable Roman numerals and tapering hands, black on white, telling them they had trains to catch, weary as they were, they had eventual destinations somewhere in what would surely be the dark night of a station platform in some distant town or other faraway city—it would be very easy indeed to give the whole thing a somewhat logical explanation like that.

But the truth of the matter, and what I honestly still remember to this day, is that I didn’t want to explain it, there was nothing to be interpreted. And what I know is that it simply left me with an undeniable feeling, not about the scene in particular then or wanting to later depict or write about it, but just a feeling, strong and sure and almost dizzying in my longing, an overwhelming and tangible need.

I really felt like I wanted to be writing my own fiction, like nothing else in the world, to pick up where I had left off earlier that morning on the short story I had been working on. I really felt that I just wanted to be there again at the desk, writing that short story, or anything else, for that matter.

The traffic light changed. I crossed the street and headed toward the Place de l’Opéra and the Grands Boulevards. I didn’t stop for a coffee in the course of the long walk back, and I just desired, very much so, to be in the apartment in the Marais, writing again.

2.  The Statue of Chopin by the Sea

This time I was in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro specifically.

You see, lately I have been doing something, as I’ve written about before. I go to a place where literature I love is set, and the travel doesn’t entail any other express purpose, like that of the teaching appointment I had been lucky enough to land in Paris—this kind of travel is always altogether different. What I do is pack a small bag with a few changes of clothes and a few texts, and I head off for a couple of weeks, solo, to reread a writer there, immersing myself in the work “on the premises.” True, I’ve read Borges stories in Buenos Aires, and I’ve read Flaubert’s meditation on ancient Carthage, the novel Salammbô, in Tunisia. I’ve read Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, holed up in a great little twenty-five buck-a-night motel called the Ole Miss right off the main square with its antebellum white courthouse there, and I’ve read what could be ensconced among the handful of my absolutely favorite modern novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, in Cuernavaca.

And in Brazil it was Machado de Assis’s 1881 Epitaph of a Small Winner. The novel recounts the odd life of an elegant Rio gentleman, Brás Cubas, and is presented in the form of an autobiography written from the other side of the grave; actually, the spooky narrative strategy gets announced right up front by an alternate, but not as good, English translation from the Portuguese that sticks to the original title, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Machado’s book is essentially an experimental one that was far ahead of its time, a text that became important to a lot of the generation of daring American writers who made their mark in the 1960s and ’70s—everybody from John Barth to Donald Barthelme to Susan Sontag, it seems—and I guess it took hold in my writer’s psyche about that time, too. The power lies in the sheer virtuosity of the performance, a tour de force both in its nervous, darkly humorous take on life, with a postmodern (Beckettian?) mindset well before even modernism, and an unflagging commitment to startling invention in style and structure throughout.

And after over a week in the city, rereading Machado, exploring some of the Rio associated with him (where he had lived; his burial crypt built into a hillside in São João Batista cemetery; the forgotten little museum room of manuscripts and artifacts from his life tucked upstairs in the Brazilian Academy of Letters building downtown, etc.), I found myself leaving my hotel in Catete one sunny, very hot weekday afternoon, and, again, just walking.

Or maybe not just walking, because I was certainly thinking about a lot of things. (Things like what I had, in fact, learned here concerning Machado de Assis and his work, as well as, and more importantly, a new friendship I had formed with a Brazilian ex-diplomat/poet, whom I’d been told by a Brazilian acquaintance in Austin to contact in Rio. The acquaintance had assured me that the ex-diplomat/poet would be somebody I could talk to about Brazilian literature and who also represented a long tradition of the country’s writers often having careers in the foreign service. I had spent a wonderful afternoon with him—an older man and a bachelor himself—out at his sprawling and pretty cluttered apartment in an aging tropical high-rise in Copacabana, a thunderstorm pounding darkly outside as we talked for several hours about literature ranging well beyond that of only his native Brazil. Since that session, he had been phoning me at the hotel just about every morning, for long, intense conversations on many more matters literary. The talk could involve an assortment of topics, including his extended, and damn interesting, ruminating in his whispery voice about the comparative poetic potentials of various languages, of which he spoke several—French versus English versus Portuguese, let’s say—and also what he had noticed just the night before in reading a collection of my short stories I had given him; that call came at nine in the morning on the day I took the walk, and, whispery-voiced as ever, he gently offered the observation that I had used the word “benevolent” twice within three pages in one short story and said that I should be careful of such slips, or I should always be as very careful as a poet even when writing fiction—and I knew he was right.) The small hotel I’d set myself up in was a fine and cheap enough family-run place in the Catete neighborhood, a few streets up from the sea and not far from the city center; the turn-of-the-century yellow building, formerly a townhouse, backed up to the public park that had once been the formal gardens of the very faded pink old presidential palace, when Catete—rundown and comfortably funky now—had actually been chic. There was no literary landmark of any variety I was looking for this day, though I did pass the inlet of Botafogo with its extensive sailboat harbor, a locale that turns up several times in Machado’s work. I think I simply wanted to do what I hadn’t yet done—go clear to the other side of Pão de Açùcar, the umber, rocket-shaped seaside mountain that is, of course, the Rio de Janeiro icon, and see the neighborhood of Urca; I had heard that it remained one of the most handsome older pockets of the city.

I could have gone out there by rattling city bus, but I decided that while it was a couple of miles, the route along the sea and beside the old winding expressway would be nice, perfect for walking. Not that walking in Rio was always entirely casual, I’d learned. One of the sad truths of this particular moment in Brazilian history was that street crime was rampant, a product of the larger truth that throughout Rio the Third World of utter poverty seems to be thrust flat against a First World of economic success and even outright glitz; the whole city is laced with steep, conical hills bearing mazes of makeshift tin-and-terracotta squatters’ shacks, the favela slums that repeatedly rise up like maybe just so many remembered and very haunting dreams, everywhere. And I will admit I was a bit uneasy when I had to make my way through the urine-pungent pedestrian tunnel below the empty freeway and to the other side of it by the inlet at Botafogo, where there was a concrete concourse surrounding the tunnel’s exit and a bus stop stranded there, no buildup of anything nearby. Men in rags—and some not men, only teenage boys—slept in nooks along the concrete walls splattered with graffiti; my being alone and obviously not Brazilian—somebody wandering uninvited through their sleep world, you might say—I undoubtedly stood out as a tourist, and one now in a territory where I really shouldn’t be, at that. I usually kept a ready supply of coins for the shoeshine boys in Catete, to pay them not to shine my shoes and at least smilingly give them something, telling myself that I’d tried to help; here, however, it might not be that simple, I knew, and muggings, often at gunpoint, were rampant in Rio, almost to the stage of being mere commonplace occurrences and apparently part of the accepted give and take of daily city life. Nevertheless, once beyond the bleak concrete concourse at the tunnel, then taking a turn to the other side of Pão de Açùcar and walking down a wide, straight palm-lined boulevard in the heat—it must have been an even ninety degrees in December, Brazil’s summer, with humidity to match—I felt a little stupid, or possibly guilty, for having been so apprehensive. While everybody I met in Rio kept warning me to always be careful and keenly on guard, I personally wanted to believe the situation wasn’t as bad as often described.

I continued on, toward the village of Urca and the little beach I knew was there, called Praia Vermelha.

The boulevard stretched before me, with those tall, spindly palms and the roadway lanes divided by a grassy central island landscaped with overgrown oleander, the stars of the fleshy blossoms bursting white or pink. Steep and seemingly jungled emerald embankments rose up on both sides, and it was still empty on the sidewalk, though soon there were many more people for a while. Especially young people. They were obviously students, getting on and off the sooty yellow city buses with book packs, because in the stretch I now passed through was an older campus of the University of Rio de Janeiro; it continued to be used for some classes and lately was also a venue for conferences and the work of various research institutes. The fine nineteenth-century university buildings (formerly part of an asylum) faced the street and were sort of a wedding-cake architecture—Neoclassical and bright white—with lumpy red-tile roofs and no shortage of balustraded balconies and definitely “grand” front staircases, all surrounded by well-kept gardens and lawns. I could already see the sea up ahead, shimmering in the distance and at the end of the wide boulevard, where there seemed to be a rather formal, and somewhat out of place, open square.

And I could already smell the sea, along with the wafting perfumy fragrance that no matter where you are in Rio, a city of ever-blossoming flowers, does define the place. And here’s where it gets tricky again, because continuing on toward the end of the boulevard, past some functional 1950s-style buildings now, squat high-rises painted pale green and part of the national military school, I started to anticipate something.

I mean, it was as if suddenly the whole outing wasn’t merely a walk, and it was as if I was being drawn along, was moving toward something very definite even if I didn’t know what it was, the soles of yet another pair of cushiony black-and-white nylon Reeboks rhythmically slapping, yes, I was moving with nearly somnambulistic conviction to whatever it was I would find at the end of this boulevard and the Praia Vermelha there at the sea waiting before me.

I passed what looked like a parade concourse for the military school, studded with a commemorative pillar, and there was a parking area, formed by a traffic-circle bulge in the boulevard, for the cable-car station that offered airy rides up to Pão de Açùcar; reportedly, the peak afforded spectacular views perhaps surpassed only by those from even higher up above Rio, at the enormous white statue of Christ the Redeemer with arms perpetually outstretched, perched on its own lofty mountain behind the city. And I then came to the end of the boulevard and the open square, empty. It was paved with large rectangular slabs of dark stone laid like tiles, and there were old-fashioned lampposts and benches, everything set at right angles and geometrically precise somehow, for a design that you couldn’t quite peg as to period, or—this is it—pretty much timeless, I’d say, easily the stuff of a de Chirico painting. This square opened onto the perfect crescent of the little beach tucked in by the mountains, and the brown sands actually had a reddish tinge, living up to the name, Praia Vermelha. The low, glassy waves lapped lazily and whisperingly in the stillness of the day, and at the far edge of the square, on the side facing the water and at the exact midpoint of the plaza, was a single bronze statue—green going to black—set on a pedestal.

In the afternoon heat, I walked toward the figure.

Youthfully slim and hair swept back, dressed in breeches and high-collared jacket with a puffy cravat, Chopin was captured in a stance that had him romantically listing to one side, very contemplative and facing forever Guanabara Bay and the sea.

I stared at the statue. I’m not even sure whether what was provided on the plaque affixed to the granite pedestal sank in for me; there was some rubric explaining how the statue had been a gift of the Polish citizens of Brazil to their country, though in what year or to commemorate what particular occasion I would never really know or later investigate. But that didn’t matter, and all that did matter while I stood there was that again, as on the walk in Paris, I had ended up where I hadn’t expected to have ended up. In other words, a rather random walk had taken me to a place—and a scene—I surely never expected to have come to, but it was, I fully knew now, a place where I very much wanted, and even needed, to be.

I looked out at the beach. It was no more than a few hundred feet wide and with but a dozen or so people in swimwear sitting here and there on low canvas chairs on this a weekday mid-afternoon. There were some fine waterfront villas, the handsomeness of the Urca architecture that I had read about in guidebooks, at the foot of the sheer stone cliffs on either side; farther out, where the water striped alternat-ingly aqua and a very dark blue, almost purple, was a long red-hulled freighter heading out to sea, moving toward the horizon, I guess, but in a way not moving whatsoever.

I sat down for a while on one of the benches in the open square. I slipped off my shoulder the little daypack I had been carrying and took out a bottle of mineral water, to slowly sip from it and think some more about things. (At this point in my life, unlike in Paris a few years earlier, there wasn’t the woman in question to think about, and that hadn’t worked out, though I wished it had. But there was more to think about concerning what the ex-diplomat/poet had told me, many things to think about on that front, also his latest poems that he had shown me as we sat together at the big mahogany dining room table in his apartment in Copa, his handing me the carefully typed sheets to read, some in English and some in French. They were good poems that I went through one by one as that thunderstorm outside intensified and as the younger man who lived with him—a pleasant, handsomely muscular Brazilian of African descent in T-shirt and shorts named José—did ironing in the kitchen then brought us a large pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice, smiling as he set it on the table, gentle and polite. I suppose that out at Praia Vermelha I even thought about the writer I had journeyed to Brazil to think about, Machado de Assis, the triumph of the novel Epitaph of a Small Winner, which had become, for a time, a veritable cause taken up by many contemporary American writers and that probably could rank as the single greatest contribution of all South American literature written in the nineteenth century, for me, anyway.) But to be honest, I have no recollection today exactly what I thought about while sitting on the bench.

There was just something about being there, something about the very concept of a lost little beach, more or less deserted, and a statue of Chopin contemplating forever the sea. And at this place, and as when I saw the travelers with the roller luggage all slowly moving toward the Gare Saint-Lazare, I realized it wasn’t that this was a setting I was ever going to write about and use in a short story of my own.

It was just that overwhelming feeling, again and more than anything else in the world, that I wanted to be writing my fiction, getting back to it as soon as I could, in this case to somehow immediately dispose of the several thousand miles and many hours of an overnight jet hissing on and on through the darkness, then a change of planes in Atlanta and finally a taxi ride on the freeway back to my place in Austin. I wanted to write as much as I had ever wanted to in my entire life, including when I was a kid taking undergraduate creative writing classes to the point that I held some kind of record at my college then for the number of them taken, dreaming of someday publishing, or even when I did get some attention and good reviews on at least one of the books I eventually went on to publish, granting the book never did sell very well—yet all of that had encouraged me, made me want to continue on with writing.

Or maybe this was so much more than anything I had known before. And right then and there I intensely wanted, now that I was indeed older and admittedly didn’t have the luxury of any full arc of a career ahead of me, to once again be sitting down at my desk in the back room in my apartment there on a stubby cul-de-sac street in Austin, Texas, to simply be writing, even if so much else in my life—the failed relationships I didn’t try hard enough to make work, a longtime job in a stifling English department in Austin where the so-called scholarly colleagues around me too often seemed like only busy careerists far removed from the genuinely important in literature, the students deserving better—true, just to be writing again seemed to be all that mattered, even if most everything else in my life, to be entirely honest about it, could at times feel as if it had never added up to very much.

I was still sitting on the bench.

“A statue of Chopin by the sea.”

I think I whispered it aloud, liking the very sound of it; I sipped from the bottle again. The water was cool, and for insulation I had wrapped the clear plastic bottle in a thick towel from the hotel before leaving, an old trick I had learned years before in traveling.

I screwed the blue cap back onto the bottle, put the bottle back in the daypack, and zipped the thing up. I got up, slipped the pack’s strap over one shoulder; I walked around the open square some more.

Two uniformed soldiers—young and smiling, from the nearby military school, most likely—were chatting with the guy who had a handcart marked PIPOCA at the far corner of the esplanade, under the limbs of a shading grove of eucalyptus trees; the cart on its bicycle wheels was a red contraption with shiny chrome trim, and the freshly popped corn itself, pipoca, lay heaped up high behind its glassed sides.

I listened a while longer to the low waves softly lapping on the sand before starting back toward the palm-lined boulevard, to finally wander through the sweet little neighborhood there directly below Pão de Açùcar, the whitewashed village of Urca proper and its maze of hilly side streets, everything impeccably groomed.

Until eventually, sure enough—and this is where it all gets stranger and even amazing, or that’s the way I see it now, anyway—three days later I somehow was back at my desk in Austin again, putting together the words that as always (somehow magically? somehow inevitably a minor miracle?) became the sentences that became the paragraphs, as I worked on a new short story that was going well, one I was feeling very good about.

Which is to say—at the desk once more and at long last, I was writing.

2009, FROM AGNI MAGAZINE, AND ALSO
THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2010