I was here. Now I can always say it, although my medium of proof ran out of battery power. Imagine being here without a charged camera! I was here. I had the obligatory three Euro grand café crème with a Gaulois cigarette. It was grey and cold. The giant porcelain copies of indigenous bugs were for sale in every shop. They began their electronic buzzing and chirping when pedestrians tripped the sensors. The artisan shops were immaculately lit. The Gaulois burned too fast. The café was miniscule.
The small church swallowed me into its womb, blackened, dappled in candlelight. When my eyes adjusted I could see the details in the hand-blown colors of pieced window glass, the small iron carriage filled with hay. I misread the text to mean that the Prince of Monaco used it to carry him to his baptism. It's for the lamb. The lamb is carried, Nissim said.
My nose ran. The plaque across the alleyway lane read that Jeanne Mathieu had lived in this house for fifty years after having earned the Medalle de Resistance, among many other honors. All the cafes were open but no-one stopped.
Nissim dropped me here after chastising me for getting the absolutely wrong boxes for shipping my extra weight up north. He talks only of the poor Pope today, saddled with all his statute of limitations forgiven pedophile priests. It’s the end of Christianity! The beginning of the Muslim dream!
The wind blew so hard up here on this medieval rock that it rattled the metal rafters of the tarpaulin protecting me. I bought a cadeau for la petite Jasmine, just a sweet Provencal coloring book, not the figurines of three headed black dogs, or fire-breathing dragons, not lanced knights on horseback or blonde princesses wielding wands, though she would have probably liked them better. I’m on a three Euro budget.
I thought of lighting a candle for us, this constantly separated couple, in the church silence, the space where wishes might be heard, but decided against it as if it might be a taboo.
Nissim is angry andjovial by turns.Over breakfast he told me about the mistake I had made in keeping to myself in the small cottage when I arrived. He wanted to know if I realized that we hadn’t had a conversation before! he told me: In the North Pole you eat together! I apologized for my former exhaustion, my loneliness here cured only by more solitude, the American way of not wanting to bother others, to keep to one self. I reminded him that we had conversed. But not about art!Not about beauty and literature and life! I said I thought art might be the only thing that keeps people alive, and he agreed. But on the subject of film he raged in front of his giant fire. He could care less!! And why should he?!
I wonder if my sentence to wander as a guest from place to place, in and out of other's whims and moods, isn’t my tithe for being a writer. But I was here. I can always say that. Sitting apart, scribbling. wondering if those passing, seeing me in my cape with pen in hand, take me for part of the place.
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