Today I got my Honda smogged at Nissan in Guanajuato. Then I drove over to the new Honda dealership and pulled into the Service entrance. A young woman in a jacket came out of an office to greet me. It was 11 in the morning, long after cars had pulled in for service. She held out her hand and said Buenos Días. I reciprocated, bowed a little the way my mother must have taught me, and brought my heels together—maybe from seeing movies. There was no click because I was wearing sandals. I did have to go to dancing school when I was about eight years old. I do thank my mother for that, since it gave me a life-long advantage over male competitors who are reluctant to or don’t know how to dance. Your value as a male leaps when you know how to dance and bow a little. The young woman was a facilitator. I told her one of my lights wasn’t working, on the left side. She went away and came back with a mechanics’ supervisor. I turned on the lights, he nodded and walked away. He came back with a mechanic. I had thought the matter was going to be complicated, involving removing a lot of things under the hood to get at the delinquent bulb. He signaled that I should open the hood. He reached in and in maybe eight seconds had the bulb in his hand. With a look of satisfaction, a detective finding key evidence, he held it up to show us all that it was blackened from the short inside it. The two men went away, the supervisor to the Parts window to inquire about the bulb. I did not expect them to have the bulb. They are a relatively new branch of Honda, plus it is my experience that in Mexico you often have to come back for something you need. I believe that comes from a culture that has learned to avoid the cost of maintaining an inventory that may not be sold. The work area was a high-ceiling shed, with big doors open at either end and a chilly wind passing through the work space. I chatted a little with the young reception woman. I am sure, aside from cleaning people, she is one of the lowest paid employees at the dealership. She had a jacket on and was clearly still cold. I stood in front of the engine looking in. “It’s pretty clean for ten years old,” I said. She agreed. The supervisor came back and said they would have the new bulb the next morning after 9. Maybe, I thought. The engine gave off heat. I was like standing in front of a very warm radiator, the old fashioned steam kind. I mentioned this to her and invited her to join me. We stood with our backs to the motor and chatted. She was a smart person, personable, friendly. And poised culturally and socially that she could stand beside an unknown gringo of years and feel relatively comfortable. If I were head of Honda, I would make sure she rose in the ranks as far as she wanted to go. I just thought I’d mention it. The moment. And where a burned out headlight bulb can lead.
Blog
Inside a Mexican Prison, Twice
When I’m about to have a new Mexican experience, in this case visit a friend inside a Mexican prison, I like to write about it as if the event has already taken place. This way I can explore my frame of mind before the fact.
I write in the voice of my friend.
“I was seized and put in prison for [ ]. With some pain, I stand most of the day at the door of my cell, looking across at my neighbors. One of them, they say, carried bales of marijuana in the back of his pickup from one dusty village to another, when two young horses bolted in front of him and, even at low speed, got their legs broken and had to be shot. The police came and detained the truck as evidence. When they later came to the driver’s house, they said they had found a package of the illegal herb. He said he didn’t know that hay was illegal. I say he deserved to be in prison for stupidity alone. He also never caught on that the police had taken the whole load for their own purposes, except for the one little package. Later, he received a warning: Say where the marijuana is or pay the consequences. Yesterday, while in line to enter his cell, someone stabbed him in the kidney and he died quickly.
I have to turn around every so often. There are five other men in my part of this tomb, and I have already been raped by two of them, while the other three held me down.
I would kill myself if I had a weapon. After I had put a bullet in each of my five roommates. On the other hand, maybe not. I understand their thinking—a vigilante justice, even if it was delivered through an unjust act.
They give us pills. Mine are small and pink. They lower the stress, but not the fear. When I whispered news of their crime against me, the guard said I needed to smell the shit I had left around me, and that he would slit my throat if I ever came near his family.
The pill makes it hard to link ideas, remember facts, remember anything at all about my alleged crime. I’ve just received my morning pill. I have been spitting them into the toilet for a week now. That is because I need to remember.
The American and his wife came to visit today. I knew they would avoid mentioning the charges against me. It’s better that way. It’s too complicated, there’s too much uncertainty. But the charge was still there, floating in the thick glass between us. Here’s the context. We hold the old phones and look at each other. I am bad, they are good. I appreciate them coming, but they cannot help, cannot lift the shame or save me from my roommates. I think they could see some of my pain and hopelessness. We joked as we always do. Hadn’t I paid my telephone bill? he asked. No, nor the water bill, I replied. I am glad they came and hope they will come again. Though I may not be here. If I remember something and see that I am guilty, I may take action. The only question is what action that will be—if the state wants to take my freedom away from me forever.”
***
This is what actually happened when we visited the prison.
In the parking lot, we left our valuables under the mad collection of things we keep behind the back seat of our car. We hid cell phones, house keys, credit cards, pepper spray and a jackknife. We approached the first gate—a small building, part of the main fence. Just inside the door, on the left, there was a counter, and a young guard standing behind it. Cordial greetings all around. He was friendly and professional, without attitude. As we had been advised, we present our Mexican driver’s licenses. He asks if we had knives, cell phones, any kind of weapon. We said we didn’t. He pointed at D’s black pedal pushers. He said shorts we not allowed. D. said she didn’t think they were shorts. Plus, they’re black, he said. Only guards wear black. Still, he said she might get through the next gate. Across from the counter there was a window, with a woman officer seated behind it. We stepped up to it and presented our driver’s licenses. The woman entered something into a computer. She held up a wand with what looked like an eyeball taped to the top of it and took a photo of each of us through the glass. A kind of grocery store receipt came out of the computer, twice, with our photos on our respective receipts. With those pieces of paper and our licenses, we crossed an open area and entered the main prison entrance.
At something like a wardrobe counter in a museum we gave up D’s car keys, my belt, and one other not too dangerous item, which I’ve forgotten. I stepped into little room marked “H” for Hombres, D. into one marked “M” for Mujeres. An agreeable guard frisked me. He seemed to concentrate on the top of my shoulders and my upper back. He never went down my pant legs. Out of the blue, he asked me how Mexico is treating me. Not anticipating something other than an instruction, I asked him to repeat what he had asked.
“How is Mexico treating you?”
I said I loved Mexico—which I do. He liked that.
I walked out the exit door of the frisking booth. They pointed us to stairs leading below ground. At the bottom, we walked along an underground passageway to where we could see a heavily guarded control booth in front of us. But our way was blocked by floor to ceiling bars. We had to turn right, walk thirty feet along the bars, slip through a narrow opening, then walk back along the bars until we were at the guard booth again.
There was a small square opening a little higher than head level. One at a time, we passed our driver’s licenses and grocery store receipts with photo through the opening. We were allowed to proceed. We climbed stairs and came out in the visiting area, rooms separated by thick glass and bars. A female officer took our passes and licenses through a slit below the glass that enclosed her and placed a call to summon the interno, the prisoner, the friend we were going to visit. She told us to take a seat in a line of chairs against a glass wall. It would be a minute or two.
A middle-aged woman climbed the stairs, showed her pass and sat down beside us. Our friend came through a door, saw us through the glass, beamed and waved.
I went first. A wall of bars slid to one side, just enough so that I could slip through and sit down in front of my friend, separated by thick glass and bars. He picked up his phone. I picked up mine.
“You didn’t pay your rent?” I asked.
He laughed. There was some initial embarrassment on his part and his face flushed a little.
I ask him how he was. He wore a neat khaki uniform, hair and moustache neatly trimmed. Good, he said. In fact, he looked the best I had ever seen him. His eyes were clear, he was slimmer and his color was good. I saw no sign of stress. I asked about his health. He said when he mentioned being a diabetic, they had given him a special diet, and the food was good. I asked him about his safety. No, none of that, he said. You show respect to the people around you, and you’re treated well. He said he was learning guitar, going to various classes, there were weights and a walking area. He had friends. He was in fact the picture of a happy man leading a well-ordered life.
He said he didn’t think he’s going to be in the place very long and that the matter would be cleared up. He said he had not one but two lawyers.
Some of his problem, I realized has to do with legislated changes that have not yet taken place. In practice, the law is still Napoleonic Law. You are guilty until proven innocent. Plus everything moves very slowly.
After something like five or seven minutes, the guard cut the phone and we could no longer hear each other. Continued contact requires some gesture. He put his hand against the glass, I place mine against his. Then my other hand, then his too. It is a curious moment, two men showing closeness and loyalty through thick glass and bars.
Then he visited with D. While I was waiting, several women arrived with shopping baskets packed with full food containers. Matter-of-factly, each time the guard got up and opened her door and took the basket of food and placed it carefully against the wall behind her chair—in common understanding that families should maintain contact, especially through food.
Though there was a choice in the line of waiting area chairs, the women sat down close to me—as if there was a common bond—waiting for their turn to visit.
I wondered how the food was handled. Did they search each container for a pistol? Did the men share the food with each other? How often did the women bring food? Why the drop in security? The guard seemed part of a larger family, opening her high security door and taking the food baskets to hand them on to the prisoners after their loved ones had left.
Why I Love Guanajuato
I went on a rant when I returned to Guanajuato after two months in Paris. Now I have returned from St. Louis, Boston, Brattleboro, then we went off to Tampico, Mexico for four nights, then four nights in Mexico City, then home again. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to return to this small colonial walking city Guanajuato.
In Missouri, we biked the Katy Trail in St. Charles, where the Lewis and Clark expedition started, then paralleled it by car from Fulton to St. Louis, where it was hot and overly urbanized. I met talented, intelligent and thoughtful people there, but I think I also sensed loneliness and disenchantment.
Brattleboro was too small and too uniformly culture and counter-culture. The best hotel plays classical music over a loudspeaker in order to drive the latter group, youth without privilege, from the parking lot. They have a wonderful coop grocery store that rivals or surpasses Whole Foods. The first of two bridges crossing the Connecticut River over to the New Hampshire side still vibrates alarmingly when lumber trucks crawl across it—a disaster waiting to happen. I’m sure there are good people there, but they are probably too spread out from each other for my taste.
Downtown Boston—we have a friend who lives in Chinatown—seemed overrun with tourists and irrational in its planning. It is nearly impossible to leave the airport, go through the Sumner Tunnel and turn south toward Chinatown and the whole South Shore. Like other cities, the wealthy have abandoned the downtown. The subway—its ridership is largely people of color and working class—shuts down at 1 am, as if working people did not work at night, or need to get home. I did enjoy the two modest AirBnBs we stayed at in East Boston, across the harbor from the downtown. There was a lovely, beautifully planned walking path along the edge of the harbor to a dock where water taxis stopped, along with larger ferries. Except that it cost $12 to cross the mile or so to downtown Boston, $20 round trip. And therefore not an option for the working class—as opposed to the salaried class.
We visited family in Portsmouth, NH and stayed in a charming, old little house and walked all over the town. I could live there, except that I’m not sure there’s enough happening, for me. There was an interesting monument honoring African slaves that had died there.
We returned to Mexico. While approaching León/Guanajuato (BJX), I realized I could not find my permanent resident card, my “Credencial de Inmigrado.” And so I ran headlong into the Mexican immigration bureaucracy, itself a study in irrationality. It did not matter that I held in my hands a paper that said I was a permanent resident when I left three weeks before. I had to write a letter then and there explaining how I had lost the card. That document was stamped, and I received a tourist visa, good for only 180 days. There’s no stress like this kind. I protested that they had a record of my status in their computers. Not good enough. We drove over to Inmigración in San Miguel. The agent there told me my status had been automatically erased when they issued me a tourist card. Again I mentioned my status as permanent resident was established after ten years of paper work. Not good enough. I have to return to the U.S., to a Mexican consulate, with the proper documents (that’s no mean trick, knowing what they are), get a certain stamp in my U.S. passport, then approach Migración in San Miguel again, fill out more papers, have an interview, present documents, pay a fine and come back for the piece of plastic at some future date.
Then, after a few days of rest, we were off to Tampico, Mexico for four nights, to do research for a novel on the nationalization of oil in 1938. Tampico is rich in oil history, especially at a time when the world was gearing up for a world war and radicalized oil workers were demanding fair wages and benefits. If it had not been for Roosevelt liking Lázaro Cárdenas, the U.S. might have listened to the U.S. and English oil companies and landed troops in Tampico. Instead, the companies instigated a boycott and withdrew technical support, shipping and machinery. Mexico turned to Germany and Italy for machinery and oil sales. There is an interesting photo of a German freighter tied up next to the elegant customs house, flying the swastika.
Tampico makes St. Louis seem cool. It was hot, and the dew point was so high you couldn’t sweat and cool yourself. Depending on who you talked to, the city was either completely safe or extremely dangerous. We found a good tourist consultant, who linked us up with a trusted guide. He took us places only a novelist would want to go to. Starting from shadows underneath a railroad bridge—where people waited for outboards to take them to various landings up and down the Pánuco River, a river system a little like the Mekong in Vietnam—our guide lined up a ponga with outboard plus boatman, and we crawled up and down the Pánuco for an hour, observing freighters, navy ships, fishing vessels, wrecks of every sort, shoreline vegetation, old oil rigs, oil platforms being built and places that might reveal a large crocodile or two.
People were very sweet and helpful in Tampico. Like most of Mexico, people look out for you and warn you when you shouldn’t go somewhere. Our taxi driver from the airport told us the Army had driven out the city police and replaced them with military police. That seemed to mainly apply to the Old Town Plaza de Armas. You’re wary when you don’t know the parameters of safety and danger in a new place in Mexico. Eventually, we trusted out consultant and took small, clean, air conditioned share taxis to lovely Miramar beach (8 pesos for a twenty-minute ride), where I swam in the Gulf of Mexico—but not too far out where larger crocodiles cruise.
Mexico City on a weekend, in the Historic Center, is a mad house. We met with my publisher, then gradually succumbed to our accumulated travel fatigue and took long naps. We had a momentary fright when our Uber taxi that was to take us to the airport was blocked by Transit police. You can read about that in the post just below this one.
The point I’ve been trying to get to is this: I was overjoyed to get back to Guanajuato, where it seemed safe, simpler, calm and rational. Where all ages and classes mix in this walking city. Simplicity is the key word. There are few surface roads. You hear the sound of chickens and dogs. The rains build up and come later in the afternoon. There are the figs, avocados, oranges and limes in the garden, the many people we know and who know us, the many people we like and who like us. We seldom get into our car, because there is no need to. From the roof of the restaurant and cultural center called the Casa Cuatro—where we do yoga—you hear the Symphony practicing César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor in the next door ancient cathedral called the Compañia after the Jesuits.
There are things that bother me of course. While I was writing this, a small plane circled over the city with a loudspeaker pointed down at us, as if fighter-bombers were coming and we were being warned to leave immediately. The pilot was hawking mattresses, or something else that the sound of his motor drowned out. And there are the bandas de guerra, the adolescent bugle and drum squads, maybe holdovers from the Cristero War 1926-29 in which 90,000 people died. Recently, the lads have drummed more and bugled less—but together or separately it is little more than an ugly blaring and the thump of war. All in the name of the man who said to turn the other cheek. I can live with it, just barely—because the rest of it here is so livable and good.
Uber vs Mexico City’s Transit Police
Recently, I had my first Uber taxi experience, as well as my first experience of police corruption in Mexico city.
We had to get to the Mexico City airport. Our AirBnB host sang Uber’s praises. He would pay the taxi through his account. I would reimburse him in pesos. We would only need to call about six minutes before an Uber came. The driver would be dressed in jacket and tie, we would know all about him before he arrived since he had been thoroughly screened by the company, we would see his photo and know the license number of his car. We would each get a free bottle of water.
We waited at the corner of Motolinía and Avenida Francisco Madero. Various taxis slowed, offering rides. We waved them on. That may have been the tip off. Finally, Luis came, in a little red car, clean, new, and with the right license number. We loaded our luggage. Luis asked what terminal. We didn’t know. I got out the piece of paper with the flight information. There was no mention of the terminal. Our host looked it up in a flash with his smart phone. Terminal 1. A good minute had gone by. We got in the car. A Transit Police pulled in in front of us with his motorcycle, boxing us in. He came to the driver’s window. We had, he said, committed an infraction and weren’t going anywhere. Our host, a rational man, began to protest. What did he mean, we had just stopped to load baggage, that’s what you do when you’re going to the airport. The policeman said we would have to wait until his commanding officer got there. Out of thin air, a Transit Police pickup pulled up next to us. A female officer got out of the passenger seat and turned to the pickup’s bed. There she had a whole tangle of wheel boots, linked by cables, to incapacitate the Uber taxi. I got out. I told her we were on our way to the airport, we had a flight to catch, clearly we were tourists. She ignored me. Our host ran down to the middle of the next block, up-traffic, to consult with other police who had gathered there with their squad cars. I could see about three different flashing police lights. I assumed their activity had to do with ours, and it looked menacing. Our host ran back. He opened the truck of the Uber.
“There, look at the bags,” he said to the woman. “See, they’re going to the airport.”
The female officer ignored him and began to fumble with her nest of cables and wheel boots.
Our host looked at me. “Get in the car!”
I opened the door. Our driver—quiet the whole time—had been saying something to the motorcycle officer. He turned back toward me and commanded, “Get in!”
He started the car and began to back away from the motorcycle that blocked us. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. He pulled out and gunned it. D. turned around to wave good-bye to our host. I turned too and could see he was still arguing with the police.
“What happened?” I asked our driver.
“I told him he would have to pay for the flights if you missed them.”
After a pause, I asked, “Did they know you were going to pick us up?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So the police are with the taxi drivers and anti-Uber?”
He nodded, yes, that’s what was happening.
He held up a small bottle of water. Would I like one? I said I would. D. thanked him and said no.
While I drank my free water, I contemplated what seemed like a dark alliance between the police and the spread of normal taxis. I didn’t understand it, especially since, according to Luis our driver, Uber paid the same amount of taxes as the regular taxis: 2%! and that, like everything else, it had to do with mafias of control and was, of course, a kind of anarchic harassment. It turns out, however, that the matter is much more complicated and that Uber actually casts a long shadow, and that our host was wrong and the Transit police, right. For an intelligent discussion, scroll down to the Laura Flanders interview with a representative of non-Uber taxi drivers in an American city. I find her remarks very persuasive: http://www.telesurtv.net/…/Mexico-City-Set-to-Regulate…
The Beautiful Parisians, or the Nearby Machetes?
It’s hard returning from two months in Paris to a small colonial city in the geographical center of Mexico—Guanajuato. For the first week, you are too jet-lagged, the altitude difference is large (7,000 feet here), there’s the culture shock, and the general stress of traveling (25+ hours without sleep). You also have to climb 203 steps to get home, if you’ve gone down to the Old City. If you’ve suffered the good fortune to have already lived many years, it’s going to take you longer to recover. Now at two weeks, for the first time I am feeling like I can resume my life here. In the midst of the reentry muddle I have tried to understand why the reentry has been so difficult, an experience I’m sure others have also had. But coming back to Mexico, to its poverty and disorder, that is something apart.
I found myself focusing on the physical difference first. The trash, the graffiti—I don’t know how to say it more politely—the drying dog shit in the alleys that lace through the sides of the canyon, the friendly-hostile atmosphere in the barrio we live in, with its long history of mini gangs, juvenile violence, all overseen by the local drug dealer—whom we are on good terms with. (See earlier postings on this subject.) The drizzling rain that went on for days, the inability to sleep, cook, or find connection. For two months, I never felt I had to study a man approaching me to see whether he was a low-level gangster, although that might have been different if I had wandered at night through the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, where minorities are essentially marginalized from Inner Paris by various kinds of social engineering such as red lining, i.e. not giving house loans or renting apartments to Muslims or any Africans, and by exorbitant rents, or by a combination of the two.
I felt other kinds of threats. A few times we walked away from an abandoned package or backpack in the Metro, although there was really no safe distance to be taken if they had been bombs. A policeman—once a policewoman—always stood in front of the five-story police building one hundred and fifty feet from our apartment, always holding a submachine gun The weapon was designed to be not too heavy but also able to fire twenty or thirty rounds in one blast, without accuracy. The guard’s shots would be the only warning if the station were under attack, and he or she would be the first person to go down—an event that lies within the boundaries of possibility because there will be and already have been all kinds of blowback from the wars raging in the nearby Ukraine, Mideast and Africa. Plus, the city is open, any kind of attack approach is possible anywhere thanks to the wonderful transportation system and well-kept streets.
Inexplicably, the city has placed a huge bottle-recycling container just in front of the police station. To me it seems it would be too easy to drop in empty bottles along with explosives and detonator, enough to blow off the front half of the building. Even though police vans park on both sides of the avenue, with special swat teams sitting in them. They are the GIPN, groupes d’intervention de la Police nationale, six in each van, including the driver, always in the vans, always ready to go. They are parked very close to the bottle-recycling container. Ten minutes away by foot, two police stand across the street from the Mosque, with submachine guns. They are always there. Just the way, until recently, there was a tank that sat guarding the entrance to the Jewish Center in Berlin. This morning, by chance, I read that someone had stolen large amounts of plastic explosives, grenades and detonators from a military base in southern France. Terrorists have struck and will strike again.
I do not fear terrorism in Guanajuato. Maybe a mugging at night. (We use taxis to return home after dark.) But not C4. Plus Guanajuato doesn’t carry the symbolism that Paris does—an old center of immense power, colonial and otherwise. Guanajuato is poor and small. Tourists come for the colonial architecture, the canyon layout, the Symphony, to stroll past the elegant Teatro Juárez. People want to come here to take pictures of their children standing on the university stairs, as if that act might suggest the idea of scholarship, and hence success. An urban legend tells us that the narcos send their sons and daughters here to study, and so it is off-bounds for any kind of retaliatory violence.
I mourn my Paris Navigo card, the chip-carrying plastic card that, for seventy Euros a month, lets you jump on any Metro, tram, bus or RER light rail (within the immediate city), and a year ago there was still a water taxi that would take you up the Seine from Quai d’Austerlitz to the mouth of the Marne. Evenings, we walked down to the Seine, maybe across a bridge and up the other side, or along it. It was light until ten o’clock. When we got tired, we whipped out our Navigo cards, swiped them across the green jellyfish entrance buttons and took city transportation home.
During the day, I went to a modest health club to lift weights or workout in classes led alternatively by one woman and two men who must have trained in the military, perhaps the French Foreign Legion. With them, you were expected to perform the most advanced movements and positions without step-by-step instruction or time to build up the needed muscles. Then I walked to the Café Dose on Mouffetard, where I had a cappuccino “déca” (decaf) and read background for my current novel. The small tables there are very French in that they are separated from each other by about an inch. Often it was too warm inside, and, worse, too much English is spoken by young American students who have discovered the good coffee. Then I walked home through the Jardin des Plantes, a mixture of botanical garden and park—a lovely way to cut through the city.
All this changed when I started attending the ARC conversation sessions, where I got to meet French discussion leaders and young professionals from foreign countries. I wrote about these extensively earlier (below) as “Notes on A Conversation, Paris, 2015.” In that new pattern, at a little before ten in the morning, I walked quickly to the Gare d’Austerlitz, bought Le Monde or Libération (newspapers, center and left), dropped down into the tunnels, swiped my Navigo card and rode the Metro Nr.10, direction Boulogne. On the train, I reviewed my French notes from the previous day. In ten minutes or so, I was in the center of the Left Bank and got out at Marbillon, rode the escalator to the surface and, in two three more minutes, got to sit down for two hours and fifteen minutes of French conversation with people from all over the world, but mostly Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Syria, Iran, the Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Vietnam and Turkey.
I suppose what I did in Paris for two months was new and exciting. Anything afterward would be a let down. As I said, Guanajuato seemed dirty, but also stuck in dis-repair, mired in passivity and corruption at all levels, a jewel in a country without employment and education for so many. I discovered some hidden racism, in myself. The people I passed in the alleys seemed short, dark, poor, poisoned by the Coke they consume, not that any of it was a fault of their own. ( I had a short exchange with a friend as a result of the last line, on Facebook. I think she found the words “short” and “dark” and “poor” troubling. Maybe especially the word “dark.” I wrote back: “I made tribal, classist, elitist racist comparisons. The color (dark) is Indian blood, the height (short) is from centuries of malnutrition (maybe), passivity I blame on the patriarchal Church, corruption on colonial political and economic structures (not unique to Mexico), and I do not know what other petulant things I said. We are all racist and tribal. Those qualities surprise us sometimes when they ooze out. It is better to be honest about one’s feelings, the uncharitable beliefs we didn’t even know we had. And get them out where we can work on them.”
I was comparing, I know now, the humble, cordial people in the streets to the privileged, well-heeled, stressed, light-skinned, highly educated, hurrying young professional Parisians who stop in at Starbucks, then chase after success and professional survival amid the concentration of universities around the Metro stops of Cluny La Sorbonne, Odéon and Marbillon.
Unfair. Stupid. Did that mean I wanted to be in Paris?
At this moment, I am reminded of my French friend’s plaintive remark: that it was hard for her to paint in Paris when so many great painters had come before her. I did not have that trouble and wrote a fair amount. But, at the same time, I know that my real productivity (and thinking) is linked with this beautiful, wretched country of so little hope, that is so full of grace, where there is so much beauty, where you are not safe, but where you are also not alone, and where any of those humble people I have maligned would reach out to help me if I were in trouble. The vast majority of them.
Slowly, I have re-discovered young Mexican friends in the places I frequent—cafés, yoga, restaurants. Bright, kind people, there are painters, musicians, writers and teachers here whom I care about, and who care about me. Small things are beginning to happen again. Strangers greet me on the canyon stairs. In contrast, if I happened on someone coming or going from our small Paris apartment, they seemed to choke in their attempt to respond to my Bonjour. Slowly, all the small stories of people I know, from flower lady to beggar to affectionate neighbors are beginning to come back to me. A mixture of social classes, respect and, above all, cordiality. Except for the local little gangsters. K, whom I have written about before, and his brother (maybe two of his brothers) have been breaking into nearby houses with machetes. Taking things, menacing people. That was unwise. While the police may not do anything, men in the neighborhood may reach for their own machetes, literally or figuratively, and take justice into their own hands. Fifteen-year old M, whom I’ve also written about, liked to ride a pretty good bicycle I regularly lent him and said I would give him if he stayed in school. Last night, he knocked at the door, upset. He said men had taken the bike away from him at knife point. In our kitchen, he told us the story three or four times. It happened several miles away. In Valenciana, he said. We said it was not his fault. M spins tales, lies—for many reasons—most of them unclear, except that his parents (especially his father) have pretty well abandoned him and he has to invent the importance he doesn’t feel. He is very smart and could excel under the right circumstances. He has read every single book in our children’s library. He mentioned that K and his brothers would never have dared take the bike from him because they knew we would not stand for it. But now we are beginning to think that that’s what may have happened. With M truth often lies in the possibility he says does not exist. Did he sell it? Did they threaten him and he can’t say who did it? One good neighbor friend said, “In a few days we’ll know more, because people talk and it gets around.”
Oddly, M’s experience snaps me out of my two-week re-entry funk. My petulance, my whining. This is the world I live in, where people are good, where nothing is clear and everything is real—most of all when it is incomprehensible and always pending.
Notes on a Conversation, Paris, June 15, 2015
There is an old desert saying. If there were three camels, it is enough to say there were only two. That is to say, when recounting events, it is all right to limit and shorten, as long as the essential truth of the matter remains. I made that up, but I think it makes an important point. I have left out several days of notes on my French conversations, and so I will only mention two. The first one, horrible in all respects from which I came away feeling stupid, incompetent, as if I were in the wrong country. The woman, perfectly decent I suppose, when a few words had left my mouth, said she could hear my American accent and that she hears it in other students. I said merci as ironically as I could. She had great difficulty looking at me from then on, perhaps sensing a rebel. I should mention that all of us students in these ARC conversations expend massive amounts of energy trying to understand each other, often with great difficulty. You would never say to a, say, Vietnamese woman, obviously very intelligent, that you can’t understand a word she’s saying.
Our animator, unfazed, launched into a long discussion of French meat dishes. She brushed off comment or questions, as if they were bothersome and interrupted her monologue. I could see eyelids sagging, the drop in energy. She mentioned rôti boeuf, rump steak, perhaps into minute forty-five of her discussion. My handsome Turkish friend sat across from me. He seems endlessly composed and good-willed. He also seems to like to talk about meat. A little petulantly, I mentioned I was a vegetarian. I’m not entirely. I eat fish and chicken. Assan smiled at me, not giving away the reason why. She turned to me and said she ate vegetables, in such a way that indcated that further discussion was not needed. Assan mentioned a good Turkish restaurant, Gemlik, 49 rue d’Enghien, 75010. The 10 at the end means that’s the arrondissement. Gemlik is rated 4.5 of 5 and #5977 of 13585 on TripAdvisor. She mentioned boeuf bourguignon. With nothing else to do, I wrote down the word bourguinon. Trying to make the best of it and knowing I would not be getting the kind of conversation I wanted, I asked her what magret meant as in magret de canard. She said she didn’t know. I looked it up on my iPhone: borrowed or derived from maigre, containing little fat. The opposite of what I think of duck meat in France.
A soft-spoken young Iranian woman with a green headscarf that showed the round of her face began to talk. She was a medical student, her father worked at the Iranian embassy. She spoke softly. Her French was like the light here in our kitchen. In about a minute or two it is very bright, although it starts out a weak. Her French was very good. Her father speaks it and taught her since childhood. She wore expensive rimless glasses. She had been watching me closely since my remark about being a vegetarian. I mentioned that D. and I had seen the movie “Taxi Teheran” the night before. The leader said she had seen it. The young woman had not. The leader held forth on the repression in Iran. The young woman’s glances toward me seemed to coincide with the leader’s statements about how oppressed Iranian women were. After a while, I found myself rolling my eyes a little, looking for co-conspirators, I supposed, or just from being rebellious. Both the young woman and Assan were exchanging looks with me. I was not sure to what extent they were with me. The leader actually corrected me in a decent way. Réalisateur du film, film director, in this case, Jafar Panahi, a kind, creative man whom his government likes to imprison. This is a film you should definitely see before you agree to bomb the people there, especially this young woman.
I mentioned that D. and I had eaten at an Iranian restaurant in rue Mouffetard after the movie, one called Colbeh. The leader said there were no Iranian restaurants there. I said we had just eaten in one. I believe she said no two more times. Finally she permitted a correction in what she had believed to be real. I noticed that she had written in her notes for us “Théhéran,” with an initial extra h. Having just looked up the word myself, I reached across—her notes lay in front of her—as she was speaking—and crossed out the extra h in her spelling. I did this in good faith, being helpful. She thanked me.
I have gone on for a long time. I had meant to tell you about two camels. The other one will have to wait.
Notes on a Conversation, Paris, June 5, 2015
The leader this time was someone I would want to call the Social Democrat, although I have no idea whom she votes for or whether that is an accurate designation for someone who believes possible the evolution of men, and I do not mean Man. For the second time, she showed that among her passions the rights of women came near the top of the list.
But next came the welfare of the family, more precisely, of children. She wanted to know who in our different cultures served as the head of household. That was a good question: we came from Mexico/USA (me), Iran, Viet Nam, Tibet, Bangladesh and Argentina. She broadened the discussion. Don’t both parents have duties in raising children? I think we all agreed that that responsibility should be divided between both parents. There was a lot left out. Like there is no typical family anymore. You know, a man and a woman, and one or two children. I don’t think she was including same-sex parents, grandparents, same-sex grandparents, single parents—as in a single woman or man raising children. And what about older siblings having to take care of younger ones?
In any case, the parental authorities were obliged to answer for, support, maintain the children: subvenir was the verb she used. Was she still reading Rousseau? I’m just guessing there. They were also to constater, confirm, that they children were on the right path. The obligation of parents, in the ideal world, would be to model moral behavior. So the children would have de l’identité, identity. Parents were to supply food, roof, clothing, and moral principles. The earnest, blond, stylishly dressed Argentine woman to my right gave all good, right answers. When the leader got to me, I suggested de l’assurance and la confiance en soi—confidence in oneself. But then she or someone else began talking before I could mention that only my sons could constater whether they had gotten any of that from me, or from somewhere else.
I also said it was important to instill values. That my father believed in helping people. What I had in mind were the values, valeurs, I adopted from my parents, like honesty—while at the same time “opposing” them in virtually everything.
According our leader, they, my parents, seemed to have put me on le bon chemin, the right road. I nodded in a kind of curtsy. In reality, one’s own past, not to mention one’s present, can be a murky thing.
The leader shifted and gave us a mini-lecture on the importance of teaching our children l’autonomie, so they did not remain stuck in l’adolescence. So they could be strong in their statements, men francs and women franches.
The young Bangladeshi to my left said he thought a sense of humor was important, as well as non-violence. Rigoler, laugh, have fun. He bubbled with what he thought was funny, which included nearly everything. He ran out of words quickly.
Then it was the turn of the young woman from Tibet. She talked too softly about the similarity between the Tibetan language and the young Bangladeshi’s language. At this point, that same enthusiastic Bangladeshi, maybe thirty or thirty-five, perhaps still thinking about the word franc, interrupted the Tibetan woman, turned to me, and asked me whether he could ask me a personal question. I said yes. He beamed, “How old are you?” The leader objected, saying it was important to observe de la discrétion.
Of course, this posed an interesting moment for me. I can say I’m Pete, in order to change my identity, but I can’t change my age, public knowledge of which may affect how I am seen, as opposed to who I am, according to my imagined behavior, personality, identity etc. So it felt a little like an ageist blindsiding. Nevertheless, I nobly (and dishonestly) said something like, it wasn’t a problem in my culture and he could freely ask me. I confessed to being soixante-dix-sept. Seventy-seven. I didn’t add that I’d be soixante-dix-huit in exactly one month. He then said, breathlessly, to the leader, how wonderful it was that I was there learning a language at my âge.
There are many things you can excuse in youth. Perhaps even innocent condescension, though one could still argue that youthful patronizing may count as misstep more reprehensible than dishonesty in advanced age. Only now, days later, I realized, as in an esprit d’escalier, thinking of the perfect retort as you’re going down the stairs, leaving the room and the conversation where you did not hold your own, I should have answered I was just turning thirty-five.
It is possible that in the previous twenty minutes I had failed to model moral behavior for him, but I was too busy right then, looking up the word for condescension to be able to follow the thread. Traiter avec condescendence. But I wasn’t going to lay that on him. Re-embracing my private identity seemed like a more important task. As in, off to the gym, and shoulders back and down. I like the metaphor I’ve invented for myself. Aging is like being a highly skilled tightrope walker. To maintain your balance, it’s important not to look down.
Notes on a Conversation, Paris, June 4 2015
You can read about the conversation sessions I’ve been attending by Googling “Cercle International de l’ARC, Une porte d’amitié ouverte aux étrangers.” The cost is nominal: ten euros for the year. You have to be something like 16 –65, but that is negotiable, if you press them. This is a way to visit France (Paris) in a deeper way. It is also like standing at the borders of many other different countries and getting to know the people on the other side of the demarcation. Today, I realized how I got to do what people say is impossible: get to know a French person intensively for two hours. And that can be a great treat.
I was heartened today to be able to sit next to another attractive young Brazilian woman, maybe thirty, whom my inner sixteen-year delighted in without getting all twisted up in a sexist knot. Her husband is getting a doctorate in history here in Paris, a degree in something that has to do with what other cultures call their patrimoine, or patrimony, the cultural heritage of a country. It involved the context of the military dictatorship during the years (1969) 1974 – 1983. She has a five-year old son. The séance leader and I thought she was the one getting the degree. No, it was her husband. I asked her whether it was problem free researching records about the dictatorship. i.e., was it dangerous. She did not seem to think so. The others at the table were not familiar with the Dirty War of that period, also known as the Process of National Reorganization, a lovely Orwellian term. She was a bright, likeable, funny person, and fun to interact with.
To my right sat the second of my Turkish friends. He has a Ph.D. from Germany, he is a professor of history at a university in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. I have mentioned him before. His field is Iraqi and Iranian history. He’s writing a book on Cherif Pacha, 1865 – 1953, the Turkish general exiled to Paris. He knew about the attempt on the general’s life in 1914. He is researching police and other archival records on Pacha and Charles de Gaulle, 1885 – 1970. I wanted to ask him whether there were French police records on the attempt on Cherif Pacha’s life. But the conversation moved on to other things.
The young man to the Turk’s right was from Brazil, a sociologist, getting a Ph.D. of some kind. I’m not sure he got to say what in. A likeable fellow, who did not jump into the conversation a great deal. To his right was a young woman from Vietnam, married to a French man. She talked about the Vietnamese language, especially about the accent marks over letters that change the meaning of the word. She doesn’t speak much. I noticed lines around her eyes and on her hands, indicating she was, I thought, older than the others. Next to her sat the man from Cape Verde, Francisco, who has a wife and three children. Early- or mid-thirties. He’s working in construction, placing insulation, isolation, between walls, ceilings and floors. A long discussion of that followed. The leader mentioned fiberglass, laine de verre, glass wool. He may have been confused. WordReference calls it fibre de verre. I took the opportunity to claim that the substance was bad for the lungs. He said, no, I was thinking of asbestos. I repeated one of the phrases I had prepared: Je ne suis pas sûr, and gave a grimaced look of doubt. He liked that but stood his ground. The word for wool made him think of lin, linen. My Turkish friend said it meant flax. I thought he was wrong but didn’t say anything. Maybe you make linen from flax. Someone will have to tell me. The leader brought up other kinds of cloth: polyester. Everything is made of oil, I said, and oil was going to be the death of us, meaning that burned gas fumes are heating the earth. The leader didn’t think that seemed to be a problem and began talking about the benefits of nuclear energy, which is what supplies 70% of France’s energy. We talked about ethanol. When I got the chance, I said it was more polluting than gas. I tried a word: venimeux. He corrected me and said that was an adjective for snakes. The Turk got in on the implied criticism of France’s nuclear generators. The leader admitted that les déchets radioactifs, nuclear wastes, were a problem, but said he had confidence in the waste containers. I kept trying to bring up the counter-argument by referring to Fukushima. He said people were inventing energy-producing ocean technologies, turbines that turned first with the incoming marée haute, then by the outgoing marée basse, high and low tide. His eyes twinkled. He wanted to know from me what made the sea rise and fall. The moon, I said, like a bright four-year old. The cycle lunaire, he said. After a bit, I said there was a French conspiracy against us foreigners, and it had to do with the French u, constructed to impede foreign students of French. He thought that was a grand accusation. Everyone asked him how to say it right, and he delighted in exaggerating his mouth positions for all the vowels. Then people complained about English. I said I didn’t know why, it had the same grammar as Latin, on which Spanish, German and French were based. They corrected me. I said they were talking about language origins, and that I was talking about grammatical structure. They said I was still wrong, that English was a mystery through and through. And I left it at that.
Before we left, I asked out facilitator whether he could counsel me on how to enter into Paris’s bonne société. This was ammunition I had from another class. He asked me why I wanted to know about this. I said I wanted to be part of the elite. (Earlier he had talked about a pending French educational reform, based on a widely held criticism that the system was too elite.) After he described a few important steps, I said I thought I also needed to know how to hold and eat a baguette. I was thinking how it was hard for a gringo to hold a tortilla so the insides didn’t fall out.
When I think about it, I should have asked Francisco why he was taking the French conversation classes. It think it was a clue that he was more than a construction worker. I should have asked him about his training and education. It would not surprise me if a black man in Paris, who had higher degrees, could only find employment as a construction worker. Such are the reigning prejudices in Paris, with a whole culture of people of color being at the bottom of the economy.
Notes on a Conversation, Paris, June 3, 2015
Today I sat beside my friend Assan, the Turkish sociologist, doing research in France on a grant of some kind. To his left, a Kurd, who speaks Kurdish and Turkish, while Assan only speaks Turkish, and of course French. This was one more moment where I knew how much I didn’t know, like, weren’t they in conflict with each other? It didn’t seem that way. But their obvious respect for each other just seems like it’s part of the complexity. They are both about late Thirties.
To the Kurd’s left, a Brazilian woman of about thirty-five, married to a Frenchman who was not present. She is looking for a job in the pharmaceutical world, I believe. Sometimes I don’t hear things because I am distracted by other details. The sixteen-year old in me was stupefied by the woman’s beauty, her olive skin, her languor, her moodiness, her privilege. As she talked, I saw her quick understanding of the philology we’re discussing, the Indian languages of Brazil, the origins of all the languages at the table. All my silly judgements and beautiful woman games fell away, perhaps too slowly.
I keep mentioning skin color because it says something about class and privilege, sometimes. Assan and the Kurd are dark-skinned, especially the Kurd. The other beauty at the table comments openly about it. She is white, tall, blond, a professor of English in Argentina, an Argentine and diligent about her French, taking notes. Later, I saw her at an open street market, taking notes on the vegetable labels. Again, all of the participants are people I would never have met without being in these two-hour sessions. Most of this class consisted of a discussion on the origin of languages and words. It seems like everyone was a philologist—a way I had always thought of myself. But I found my attention and energy begin to sink. I thrive on conversation, back and forth, questions and answers, cultural comparisons. It didn’t happen. That’s okay. I enjoyed the leader very much. Man in his seventies, a former professor of engineering, but whose first love seems to be words and languages, and comparisons between them. He was very sweet and dedicated, infinitely patient, but he didn’t seem to want to have a conversation. He talked about the origins of Turkish, a language related to Finnish, it seems. Assan explained the breadth of the Ottoman Empire that came up to and “knocked” on the gates of Vienna, covered most of North Africa, the western part of what is now Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Israel, Syria and Iraq, skirting the Black Sea and holding the Balkans and the Southeast European countries—for something like six hundred years.
We discussed how one of the Popes separated Spanish from Portuguese conquests by drawing the division along the 40th Meridian. We talked about Paris’s “bonne société,” the good society, and I wondered if the lovely Brazilian had married into that, leaving her own for its. Our leader, at my request, listed the topics one did not bring up in Good Society: sex, politics, religion, any sort of conflict, but food, cars, vacations, operas, plays, exhibitions were okay. I asked whether the very topic of the Good Society could be a topic. He didn’t seem to understand. I could answer the question myself: Of course not. But these are all stereotypes, but still fun to listen to him smile as he described them. A sweet man who found humor in everything.
Aaah, so many questions I don’t have answers for.
I was the last one out of the room. I saw our leader had left his notes behind—the ones he had made during the class, in order to show us things in writing—so I stole them.
Conversations, Paris June 2, 2015
Conversation class in Paris. A sixty-year old man from Costa Rica with grown out short hair flat on top. Maybe ex-military. He described himself ironically as un Flâneur (one who strolls through life?). A smart, compassionate woman of forty something from Brasil, white skin. I didn’t catch her job or project. I thought I caught a slightly slavic accent. A young man, dark skin, of thirty-five or so from Cape Verde, an island nation off East Africa, quite a way off shore. Another white-skinned Brazilian woman, late twenties or early thirties, very white skin, writing a doctoral dissertation on Sartre. I asked her if she could say what existentialism was in one sentence. She responded, saying, We are condemned to a life of freedom. That’s as far as she got before the men jumped in. Her French was very good. The best among us. Then there was me (Pete). I walked my usual thin line between irony and serious contribution, and survived once more! Javi, to my left, from Spain, a face always a little on the red side. I keep forgetting what he does, some kind of research. I think sociology. He has a dim view of what will become of Spain. Then Ross, a Scotsman, who is learning to detect and track laundered money. That brought up a discussion of what kind of money was being laundered: drugs, arms, child-adult sexual slavery and traffic. Then came a Turk, who is writing a book on the Turkish general Cherif Pacha, exiled to Paris, where he survived an attack on his life in January, 1914 because he had opposed the Young Turks (Ottoman Empire) and won their wrath. Each day, the discussion leader is an older French person, with great variety, always a puzzle at first because of accent, clarity of voice, and political views and other presumptions. This man today, seventy-maybe, one pack a day, never once addressed the very decent black man from Cape Verde (or I think even looked at him), one of the smallest countries in the world, perfectly placed for the slave trade, later a Portuguese colony. The leader treated him as if he didn’t exist. I kept thinking his turn was coming up, but it didn’t. Our leader also gave a short discourse on the benefits French colonialism brought to Southest Asia. The older Brazilian woman exchanged a look with me over that. I love these classes. I get to communicate with people from the rest of the world in a third language. It makes me very happy.