Category: ~ New Stories of Mexico and Elsewhere

Why I Love Guanajuato

Posted on by sterlingbennett

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.

The Beautiful Parisians, or the Nearby Machetes?

Posted on by sterlingbennett

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 5, 2015

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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

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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

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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

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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.

The Racist Chocolates of Paris

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I write in one of the cafés, the Delmas, at the Place de la Contrescarpe on Rue Mouffetard, Paris. On the west side of the square, there is a sign high up on the side of a building. I am not the first to find the sign objectionable. It reads Au Nègre Joyeux, “(The place of) the Joyous Negro.”

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That’s only part of it. A large, old painting on wood hangs below it, showing a muscular young black man with a wild looking grimace meant to show his joy. Or perhaps below that, his essential diabolical nature. With a little research, we learn he is supposed to be Zamor, christened Louis-Benoit 1762–1820, from Bengali, who was taken from Chittagong, Bangladesh by slave traders when he was eleven years old. Louis XV of France bought him and gave him as a gift to his principal mistress Jeanne Bécu (Countess du Barry). She took a liking to him and oversaw his upbringing and education—as her personal servant. She died in 1794, the year that slavery was abolished in France, although Napoleon reinstated it in 1802 until it was abolished again in 1818. Napoleon died three years later. As a way to measure the present against the past, every day I walk past an enormous plantain tree in the Jardin des Plantes. It was planted in 1785 and is still doing very nicely. George Edward Dupré was born in Rouen, France in 1798, and he is still my great-great grandfather.

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The lettering and the painting below it continue to advertise a chocolate factory that was established in 1748 and is now long since gone. As I mentioned above, not everyone is happy with the lingering artifacts. Someone has tried to protect the painting with a plexiglass shield, and subsequent stone throwers have already managed to smash it in two places. A window next door has taken a direct hit and no one seems in a hurry to fix it.

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The anger likely has to do with both the wording and the painting. Zamor is shown with all the usual racist features: his grimacing mouth—to show he’s something of an idiot or crazed or both—and his eyes are of the same bright white to emphasize a darkie blackness that may date the painting to the period of the American blackface minstrel shows of the early 19th Century. He wears a large, hanging napkin around his neck, as if he were about to eat, and appears to be holding a phallic-looking carafe high in his left hand. Madam du Barry, seated, seems to be holding a silver tray that holds chocolates or small cakes. Is the idea that she is offering him things? Things in addition to sweets? It’s hard to tell through the reflected images from the Place de la Contrescarpe just opposite, but I think that was the intent.

The painting is not a particularly good one. There is a far better one from the same date as the plantain tree, 1785, by Jaques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine, currently at The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida. It shows a thoughtful man, elegantly dressed and someone whom Louis XV made the governor of Madam du Barry’s chateau and the secretary of her private affairs. The person who contracted the sign and painting seems to have had his own agenda and may have asked that the painting be sexually suggestive in all the usual racist ways, portraying the young black man as phallus-slave without full or maybe any personhood having his way with a white woman of standing, and she with him in a reverse, exciting, racial and social slumming—all ideas appealing to the racist mind.

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Were these ideas associated with eating chocolate? Or perhaps other things made of chocolate. There is in fact an old French delectable still called the Nègre en Chemise which is a dab of rich chocolate cake with a thick whipped cream companion covering. Descriptions of it usually include remarks by the cooks explaining how the name is not politically correct but that they’re going to keep using it anyway.

Madam du Barry may have been something of a courtesan, but she was highly thought of by some. She was a name people knew. Perhaps for that reason the person who contracted the painting wanted to associate his chocolates with her, just the way others at one time wanted to associate their products with Victor Hugo. Who knows how much of her bawdier reputation was apocryphal. When Louis XV was dying, he is said to have asked her to come to him one last time with her breasts bared. That sounds like a snippet of history written by a man. At the same time, Madam du Barry admired Voltaire’s work and near the end of his life sent him a note saying it enclosed two kisses. He supposedly wrote back in verse:

Quoi, deux baisers sur la fin de la vie !
Quel passeport vous daignez m’envoyer !
Deux, c’est trop d’un, adorable Égérie,
Je serai mort de plaisir au premier.

What? Two kisses for the end of my life!

Such a passport you deign to send me!

Two (kisses) is one too many, adorable Égérie [a muse for a person of letters, out of Roman mythology],

I would die of pleasure from the first one alone.

Zamor and du Barry are far more humanly complex and interesting than what one sees in the painting. If you raise a child, Zamor, there is likely to be affection involved but probably not trans-generational sex, although one writer claims that she liked to kiss and fondle him. But at what age? Zamor probably cared for her, but historians suggest he was later also disapproving, even angry at her for many of her excesses, perhaps for a patronizing attitude. All this makes rich ground for a novelist to add to the already present fictions. Here are three: Gérard Saint-Loup’s Le Nègre de la du Barry, Paris 1997; Eve Ruggieri’s Le Rêve de Zamor, Paris 2003; Joan Haslip’s Madam du Barry: The Wages of Beauty.

Zamor read Rousseau and learned there—as if he didn’t know already—about liberty. It is said he tried to persuade the Duchess to reign in her extravagances. As the Revolution raged, she took trips to England to recover jewels stolen from her. Zamor and others advised against the trips. He cautioned her not to support or shelter nobility on the run from the purges. At the same time, he was an active member of the revolutionaries, passing information to them. When du Barry discovered this, she fired him, or kicked him out, the verb depending on what his standing was: slave, freeman, servant, friend, ward or mixture of all these things. One can speculate that Zamor’s thoughts were complicated. Since history is seen and written through the eyes of the local, dominant race and culture, we have to assume he was not simply a traitor, giving her up to save his own skin—although that is a possibility. If only he had left a journal.

Things did not end well for the duchess. The illegitimate daughter of a priest and a seamstress, she came from poverty—as did Zamor—and rose to wealth and importance. Her husband, the duke, was captured by a French Revolutionary guard and dropped off at Versailles, where he and his troop were murdered by a mob and their bodies torn to pieces. When du Barry returned to France, after the execution of Louis XVI, January 21, 1793, she was arrested as an agent for the English, a theme we see in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, thrown in prison, and tried before the Tribunal Révolutionaire. Zamor is said to have denounced her twice. But it may be too easy to see her as victim and him as villain. We need the journal. Denounced a second time, she went to the guillotine at the Place de la Concorde and was beheaded there on December 8, 1793.

Petitions to highest levels have asked to have the painting removed from the building at Place de la Contrescarpe, on Rue Mouffetard, one of the most frequented pedestrian streets in Paris. The petitions have been unsuccessful. The position of the person who is supposed to decide these matters apparently doesn’t exist. Or, as I’ve read, the person and position do exist, and still the matter doesn’t move forward. Some report the artifacts are not included in the registry of historic paintings and monuments. Others say they are.

The painting is not that good. It is racist and probably lewd, as well. It should hang in a museum to show various stages in the history of French racism. The lettering and the painting are part of larger lingering issues having to do with French anti-Semitism and racist feelings about immigrants. The lives of Zamor and du Barry were far more than what we can see in the painting. Ironically, one could argue that the sign and painting should stay right where they are because they open up an important discussion. All that is missing is an enormous plaque that could give all the background information. But that might not go over so well with the square’s merchants, who want the strollers to enter their stores and cafés and not just stand in front of the painting, gawking, readying the plaque which isn’t there, and feeling troubled.

It is Wrong to Steal, and Colonizing Culture

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My father, a man who was quiet, did somehow manage to instill in me certain attitudes toward Native Americans, beginning with little mentions of Indian children that would stare through his windows when he was a boy growing up in Arizona. Then he handed me Kenneth Roberts’ Northwest Passage (1937) on the French and Indian War, and when I was sixteen, he handed me a mailing from the Exeter or Harvard Alumni Association, a story about one or the other of those two schools sending a letter to a New England Indian chief (actually a speech by an Onondaga chief Canassatego, on colonizing eduction, delivered in 1744, in Pennsylvania, on behalf of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations) inviting him to send some of his young men to learn Latin, poetics and English. The chief politely wrote back, thanking the school and saying that they had found such education had not benefited their young men the way they had hoped it would. But on the other hand, if those schools would send a few of their young men to him, they would learn to run fifty miles, argue persuasively in councils, shoot arrows with accuracy and be leaders of men.

While I was at Berkeley in graduate school, studying Germanic Languages and Literature, the most important person in my life was already dead almost twenty years before I was born, the Yahi Indian Ishi, whom Theodore Kroeber immortalized in her books, Ishi in Two Worlds and Ishi, The Last of his Tribe. As evidence of my reverence for this man I even instructed that my ashes were to be placed at the top of a certain cliff overlooking Deer Creek, Ishi’s home canyon until he was flushed out by surveyors in 1911 and became the “Last Wild Indian.”

In a recent review of a friend’s book A Terrible Beauty, The Wilderness of American Literature, I referred to a short story I had written and how it was evidence of my non-European side. My wilderness side, part of my wilderness cosmology that embraced the original peoples of the north. But I am aware that one form of colonizing is to romanticize the original peoples one’s compatriots have slaughtered. And so, I ask the question, am I doing that in this short tale that follows. You decide.

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“Those before me came first from New England and then later from Arizona, where my great-grandfather Edwin, a miner, and my great-grandmother Sarah went broke during the depression of 1890. That was when the Apaches of San Carlos, on the Fort Apache Reservation, east of Globe, began to starve and came and stood in a silent line at Sarah’s back door, where day after day, in sunlight and grayness, and drifting powdered snow, she gave away all the food they had, over and over, cooked and served each time in the same few blue-enameled dishes until they, she and Edwin, had no money and also began to starve.

The winter of 1890-91 saw the price of silver fall and mines shutting down and the winter hard and cold, endless in its duration, with coughs and fever stalking the aging couple, finally driving them to their bed, where they huddled and shivered and clung to each other, too weak to go for help, their sons too far away to know what was happening to them. The line of starving Apaches thinned and disappeared, until there was only the sound of the wind at the back door and penetrating cold outside and in.

A day passed, then two, and on the third day, a young Chiricahua sat astride a horse, leaned to look through the window of the bedroom and rapped on the glass. Twice each time, a pause, then another rap rap. Then silence. The horse, a shadow across the window, stomped and stepped forward, then backward. My great-grandparents heard something heavy hit the ground, followed by something soft. A slaughtered calf and a man in moccasins. They heard the front door push open, movement in the front room, and then they saw a young face looking through the bedroom door.

Soon a fire was burning in the kitchen stove, and heat–at first just the sound of it–stole cat-like through the door into their bedroom. They drifted in and out of dangerous sleep. Then they awoke. They heard plates banging, the sounds of cooking, and then the young Indian appeared with two bowls of beef soup with pieces of fried bread floating on top.

The boy helped them sit up, spooned from one bowl into two mouths, then spooned from the second bowl till that too was gone. He lay them back down, covered them with a hide blanket he had brought, put a pitcher of water near the bed to thaw in the temporary heat—then faded away. They heard the sound of horse’s hooves on frozen ground, and then there was silence again.

On the following day, they heard the sound of more horses. Over the next several days, some say as many as twenty Chiricahua entered the house. They were warmly dressed and snow-dusted. A few of them had come all the way from of Agua Prieta and the mountains to the south–and deeper into Mexico. It was a place where the dangers of the coming hunger had been anticipated and food had been set aside for those in need.

Three grown women—one quite old—stayed with my great-grandparents for a week, nursing them and cooking. They stuffed the open chinks in walls with bits of old blankets to keep out the cold. The young man, whose name was Walks With Snow, also came and went. The women rendered and cooked the calf and shared it with Sarah and Edwin—and with other Chiricahua.

When Sarah and Edwin could walk again, without the Indians’ help, the women rolled up their sleeping robes and rode away with Walks With Snow. But first there was hugging all around and tears and thanks—from both sides because the Chiricahuas were the relatives of the starving San Carlos Apaches whom Sarah and Edwin had helped survive. Edwin knew something about the world and therefore as a precaution took great pains to bury any traces of the calf under snow some distance from the house.

The Chiricahua had not been gone more than a day, two at the most, when the sheriff from Globe arrived, with six heavily armed men, looking for an Indian who had been taking calves from the vast 40,000-section Madison holding on the south bank of the Salt River, twelve miles to the northwest, land that had once belonged to everyone.

Edwin, who had been a brevet colonel in the Civil War, on the Union side, and who was at home on horses, accepted one from the sheriff, and agreed it was wrong to steal anything. He said he would lead them where he was sure they’d find the thief and took them—even in his still weakened state—some fifty miles due north, in the opposite direction from the route the Chiricahua had taken toward the Mexican border.

At some point, my great-grandfather, half hidden behind his great coat, scarf and fur hat, dusted white by snow, as the rest were, said he was too faint to continue and they would have to go on without him. He told the sheriff he would return the horse as soon as he could. He was sure, he said, they would find their man camped beside a certain stream which meandered vaguely northwest through a land he made sound real and distinct and so plausible that the party rode some twenty miles more before they gave up and took a short cut back to Globe and to their snug and—because they were really mostly shopkeepers and merchants—warm and still fairly prosperous homes.”

Bvajot

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Bvajot came to see me, and I did not know who he was. The name held recognitions but one I couldn’t put my finger on. I woke from sleep and there it was, like the last reverberation of a name said. But said by whom? An unclear message, clearly sent to me. And so, since there was no apparent agent, I had to assume the name came from far in back of the stage. Not from Shakespeare, and not from Iago. From farther back and from another author.

It is like a call that says, “There is you and me now, and my name is Bvajot, although I have others. Like ‘Not Yet, I’m not Ready’ and ‘So Soon?’ and ‘Choose Another, Someone Who is not Good, Who Tortures and Slices and Gouges and Burns Others Alive.’ “

But then you are gone again, and I barely get your name down. Bvajot. A Slavic-sounding name. Some place I hope not to have to go.

Questions come up, Bvajot. How did you get my number? By lottery? Spin the bottle? The first home your three-legged pig entered when the moon was full and the wind began to blow? And then you said it once. “Bvajot.” Was it to see if I heard it? And if I didn’t awake, what then? Would you have taken me? Taken me all the way? Or just marched me to the canal and thrown me into the icy water so that when I crawled out I began to shiver with my teeth arattle and fever trying to enter my ears like leeches the color of liver?

Will you come each night now and say the name? Bvajot, Bvajot, Bvakot! To see whether I hear it?

Or, feeling more confident, I ask, Is it the name of your dog, not you, who strayed over into the world of the living, but then turned away at my door, spooked by some other power? Perhaps by your own cold authority, the voice that makes wolves cringe and birds fall from the sky?

Did you begin thinking of me much earlier? When I was six and sat alone in a hospital, cross-legged on the iron bed, scrubbing abandonment out of my heart—an attack of tonsils, was that how you first found me and added me to your list?

Please don’t call again, this is a wrong number, there is no one here by that name, please remove me from your list, you do not have my permission to communicate with me. I have other plans, I will not be listening. Please accept my condolences. I will be hanging garlic and formaldehyde everywhere. I will be sleeping with squishy blue earplugs and a pillow over the upper flap. When I do not hear you, it does not count as readiness to join you in your house. And whose name is it anyway? Since it refers back to where it comes from, you are not calling me, and it is therefore your name. The call is self-referential, hence has nothing to do with me. It does not interest me anyway. The previous sentences—all the rambling—represent a lapse. That is all. Enjoy your name, call it out often. But I will not be listening. Since it has nothing to do with me. We are through, Bvajot. Good-bye forever!

Bvajot

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Bvajot est venu pour me voir, et je ne savais pas qui il était. Le nom évoquait quelque chose, je ne pouvais pas mettre mon doigt dessus. Je me suis réveillé et voilà, comme les dernieres réverbérations d’un nom prononcé. Mais, dit par qui? Un message pas clair, clairement adressé à moi. Et donc sans agent apparent, il fallait assumer qu’il était venu de loin, de l’arrière de la scène. Pas de Shakespeare, et pas de Iago. De plus en arrière et d’un autre auteur.

C’est comme un message qui dit, Il y a seulement toi et moi, et mon nom est Bvajot, bien que j’aie d’autres noms. Comme ‘Pas Encore, Je ne Suis pas Prêt’ et ‘Si vite?’ et ‘Choisis un Autre, Quelqu’un Qui n’est pas Bon, Qui Torture et Tranche et Déchire et Qui Brûle Vifs D’autres Êtres Humains.’

Mais tu es reparti à nouveau et j’ai à peine eu une chance d’écrire ton nom. Bvajot. Un nom à consonance slave. Un endroit où j’espère ne pas avoir à aller.

Des questions remontent à la surface. Mon numéro comment l’as obtenu? À travers la loterie? En faisant tourner la bouteille? La première maison que ton cochon à trois pattes a choisi lorsque la lune était pleine et que le vent commencait à souffler? Et puis tu l’as dit seulement une fois: “Bvajot.” Est-ce que ça a été pour voir si je l’entendrais? Et quoi si je ne m’étais pas réveillé? M’aurais-tu pris? Tu m’aurais pris jusqu’au bout? Ou m’aurais-tu seulement conduit vers le canal et m’aurais-tu jeté à l’eau glacée, pour que, lorsque j’en serais sorti en rampant, j’aurais commencé à trembler et claquer des dents, en même temps que le fièvre essayait d’ entrer en moi par les oreilles, comme des sangsues de la couleur du foie.

Viendras-tu maintenant chaque soir pour dire le nom? Bvajot, Bvajot, Bvajot? Pour voir si je l’entends?

Mais, parce que je me sens un peu plus confiant maintenant, il me faut demander, si c’est le nom de ton chien, pas le tien, un mascotte qui s’est égaré vers le monde des vivants, mais qui s’est détourné devant ma porte, effrayé par quelqu’autre pouvoir? Peut-être par ta propre froide autorité, la voix qui fait que les loups grincent des dents et que les oiseaux tombent du ciel?

As tu commencé à penser à moi beaucoup plus tôt? Quand j’avais six ans et que je me suis assis seul dans l’hôpital, les jambs croisées, dans le lit de fer, en frottant l’abandon loin de mon coeur—une attaque d’amygdales contre moi. Est-ce comme ça que tu m’as trouvé pour la première fois et que tu m’as ajouté à ta liste?

S’il te plaît, ne m’appele pas à nouveau, c’est un mauvais numéro, il n’y a personne de ce nom ici, s’il te plaît, retire-moi de ta liste, tu n’as pas ma permission de communiquer avec moi. J’ai d’autres plans, je n’écouterai pas. S’il te plaît, accepte mes condoléances. Je vais accrocher de l’ail et du formaldéhyde partout. Je vais dormir avec des bouchons d’oreilles d’éponge bleue et avec un oreiller sur l’oreille. Quand je ne t’endends pas, ça ne compte pas comme si étais prêt à te rejoindre dans ta maison.

Et de toute façon à qui appartient le nom? Puisque il renvoie à là d’où il vient, ce n’est pas moi que tu appelles, et donc c’est ton nom. Cet’appel est auto-référentiel et pour cette raison il ne s’agit pas de moi. Ça ne m’intéresse pas de toute façon. Toutes les phrases précédentes—toutes les divagations—ne représentent rien de plus d’une lacune. Ça c’est tout. Profite de ton nom. Appele-le souvent. Je n’écouterai pas, parce qu’il ne s’agit pas de moi. Nous avons terminé, Bvajot. Au revoir à jamais!