LIKE GOD IN FRANCE
Mayer, Milton
Like God in France Veelson's folly, Bertholet's ice cream, Mayer's hotplate, and a fire at the Hotel de Nice BY MILTON MAYER Montcuq, France Ten, fifteen, make it twenty years ago, Ms. Baby...
...It's next year's In place...
...3. You go as far away from home as possible as often as possible and stay away as long as possible...
...Why not Tirana, the Seychelles...
...5. You find a dwelling that has no television set and has a radio on which you can get, in English, only the BBC Overseas news for half an hour a day, with programs on "Watching the Bird Watchers," joke routines like the one about the Japanese who went to the eye doctor and was told he had a cataract and said, "No, I have a Rin-con Continental," and talk shows on "How Did the One-Toed Sloth Manage to Move About...
...But one cold-cut evening mine host served Portuguese sardines, in the can, and when we left the table we took the can with us and spent the evening reading the printing on it...
...In the front somewhere, in one of the rooms upstairs...
...Niagara Falls Families Leave Contaminated Area...
...And fifth, because it was, and had to be, France...
...their apotheosis, as a people, as a person, of that singular corollary of singularity, petty-bourgeois independence displayed with a monumental flourish by the late de Gaulle and the early Bertholet...
...evening after evening, night after night, without seeing or hearing anybody except the BBC on the one-toed sloth: no being dropped in on, no dropping in, no "What shall we do this evening...
...It's just as we say here in France: Honi soil qui mat y pcnse...
...There, then, you have the secret of life as I discovered it in undiscovered Montcuq...
...We went out, while the water heated, to get a fresh noontime ficelle at eight cents (now thirty-five cents), or long loaf of bread consisting entirely of crust...
...de Nice never having dreamed that he wouSd ever have as providential a tenant as Ms...
...One day we were cooking up some water for dried soup in our room at the Hotel de Nice—there was one electric outlet in the room, designed precisely to prevent its being used by the tenant (M...
...Russia Calls for Arms Halt...
...Mickey Rooney Marries for Eighth Time...
...But you know all about France...
...Believe Man May Modify Weather...
...We snuck up the stairs, put out the fire, and checked out instantly to attend a conference of Quakers, who never lie and never cheat and never set a hotel room on fire...
...Russia Said to Oppose U.S...
...Their uniformly dismal cafes, their dirty streets, their dirtier sidewalks...
...Mobile Missile Plan...
...Two hundred lire, after all we Americans did for you after the war...
...Their sacrifice of every other value to the singular, the bizarre, the juxtapositive in the arts and sacraments...
...You know about their meanness, their insolence, their unmannerliness, their eminently heartless, eminently mindful preoccupation with "realism"—the worst of allies, but by no means the most implacable of enemies...
...First, because a friend got us a deal on the rent...
...Rolling fields and forests, deep tangled wildwood where never is heard a discouraging, nor any other kind of, word...
...Baby in those winter-quarters days and weeks and months in San Candido {or Innichen) used to cook our pasta and heat up the salsa we were told to get from the Banco di Roma...
...besides the Mayers, the only couple I know of, and of them only indirectly, who go on and on playing chess are the Gromykos of Moscow...
...Pocatello...
...This last item is the secret locked inside the secret of life...
...It is just as the French say: Partir est mourir unpeu...
...Back, Briefs Carter...
...Newlywed Christina Flies Alone to Athens...
...Third and fourth, because of the deal on the rent...
...It isn't at all easy to find such a companion of the opposite sex...
...I think I'll move to Paris...
...Up from Montcuq, for the day, to have a Paris dentist charge us $25 for telling us that the infected gum was irritated and not infected at all, we walked past our old digs, in all of which, even in Paris, we had lived like God, and there was the old Hotel de Nice, closed...
...The reason it was now Italy was President Voodrow Veelson, dot dope...
...Do you still wonder how the Mayers got rich...
...Their arrogant attachment to their—i.e., to their ancestors'—language and literature...
...Israeli Warn Vance: Vancf...
...their 500,000 to cheer the Catholic Pope, their 500,000 to mourn the atheist Sartre...
...Scientists in U.S...
...Very well," said the rube, "we shall award it to Italy...
...Go get your salsa from the Banco di Roma...
...We made it there once, and went into the local cafe to negotiate some salsa, or spaghetti sauce, to take back to our room and cook illegally on our illegal hot-plate...
...Ford to Recall 1978 Cars, Trucks...
...You know their daffmess about liberty—and their realistic contempt for equality and their flat rejection of fraternity (including the fraternity of the city, of the state, the nation, the continent, the world...
...die of the room and a tureen of soup at noon and a plate of cold cuts at night...
...There we were, then...
...The headlines of the August issues of the IHT bring us all the latest: Arabs Bomb Tel Aviv Market...
...The trouble was that there was nothing to read, and San Candido (or Innichen) was three miles away, with no winter transportation...
...Baby and I are conducting summer maneuvers outside strategic Montcuq, in the impregnable Midi, or soft middle-belly, of France...
...One or two stories, no more, from four years ago seem slightly dated: U.S...
...They will not respect a queue...
...supermarkets, superhighways, shopping centers, and blind skyscrapers blindly stabbing random wounds here, there, everywhere in a sky that once gazed on the grimy magnificence of Paris...
...When the victors were taking the vanquished apart in 1919 at St...
...Your Excellency," said the Italian Premier, Signor Orlando, whose turn it was to make a monkey out of the American rube, "it is Italian...
...It is what Ms...
...Honeymoon Definitely Over for Princess Caroline, Philippe Junot...
...Fraternity, in a country that has 360 different kinds of cheese...
...the best way to convey the idea of France is the quaint German expression...
...It's considerably more fraternal in the provinces, or sticks, if less libertarian and no more egalitarian...
...writing materials in quantity...
...The more things change, the more they remain the same...
...Vance, Saudis in Talks...
...Montcuq's very name (French for "my little cucumber") is unknown outside the immediate neighborhood...
...the fabled anarchy of the fabled state of Nature...
...True, the headlines I have quoted are all from August 1978—repeat 1978—our Montcuq host having come tu Montcuq for his holiday four years ago and bundled them up when he left...
...Montcuq, not the city center, where a bicycle may go tearing through the street (not the streets), but the outer suburbs, is the place to discover the secret of life—"if there is one," said Baby to me and I to Baby as wt set forth last spring just ten minutes before Pan-Am raised its Procrustean Special round-trip fare from California {ten or eleven hours of pretzelized hell...
...When he is addressed in French, he replies in Langue-doc (French for "language of a duck...
...Banks Raise Prime to 8 1/2 Per Crnt...
...If one of us should die...
...In his press conference yesterday, the Shah promised free elections to a national parliament in 1979 despite recent violence aimed at toppling his regime...
...You will stay stricken and either recover or expire...
...That ten-gram packet, including the three ten-cent postcards, now costs me seventy cents air mail from France...
...But this same German, describing the most ecstatic adventure of his life, and running out of superlatives, bursts out with, "Wie Gott in Frankreich," "It was like God in France...
...remember when the ads used to say that getting there was half the fun...
...8. You come to terms with the silence of the day, and at night, the silence of the night, which you can prolong by closing the shutters tight, so that you can sleep through the day (like the factory-raised chickens whose coops are kept lighted all night so that they will stay awake and keep eating...
...If God were embodied—embellied, rather—France is where you would find Him...
...Nobody every heard of a Frenchman's retiring in England...
...Their monumental splendor without and their alternatively gaudy and dingy interiors...
...Well, I guess you know their breast-beating Marseillaise and their decision in 1940 to live on their knees, their exaltation of the liberty of "students" to deface walls, floors, ceilings, and the merciless crackdown of the flics, or poulets...
...Where did it start...
...The German despises the lazy, dirty, decadent French, their houses falling down, their fields full of stones...
...Writing is one such, mathematics another...
...August, and for days on end no sight, no sound of Man the Noise-Maker...
...Why Montcuq...
...True, as Horace, unless it was Ovid, or Aphid, said, no ship ever sails leaving sorrow behind, but you can pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and never unpack them...
...their banal passion for lagloire and their street-smart robbery of la patrie at tax time...
...And a real spate of front-page headlines dealing with the peregrinations of one Vance: Stalled Middle East Talks Await Vance...
...It's somebody else's plaster that's cracking, somebody else's washing machine that goes awry, somebody else's roses that have powdery mildew...
...August 1982, in farthest Montcuq, and three miles farther still, and here we are with all the news from all over, every day...
...The best way to convey the idea of France is not the story of the American who said to his wife...
...the four items, as separate five-gram intercontinental ballistic missives, would cost $2.12...
...Wie Qott in Frankreich...
...Here it is—the secret of life: 1. You ply a trade, or graft, that you can carry on anywhere, on a train, plane, car, ship, mule, carousel, prie-Dieu, pool table, catafalque, saw-horse, tree-stump, strait-jacket, bed-jacket, etc...
...So there, as I say, we were, Baby and I, buried under all that Dolomiti (or Dolomiten) snow, and with nothing to read and nothing to do but play chess and hug, alternatively, the radiator and each other...
...2. You have a constant companion who's a match for you—but no more than that—at chess...
...the whole schmier coming, as it still does, to ten grams...
...As we came down the Rue des Beaux Arts, unwrapped ficelle in unwashed hands, and gazed admiringly at our second-floor front window, we detected a curl of smoke coming through it where the putty had fallen out...
...Baby Mayer and I went into winter quarters along the River Drave (or Drau) outside the strategic village of San Candido (or In-nichen) in the impregnable province of Venezia Tridentina (or Sudtirol) at the foot of the Alpi Dolomiti (or Dolomiten Al-pen), in what was once Austria-Hungary but was now (as you may by this time have concluded) Italy...
...And now, fifteen, twenty, make it twenty-five years later, Ms...
...and you acquire neither a car nor a telephone...
...M. Bertholet's ice cream parlor on the He St...
...There's no money in meditation, only in teaching meditation...
...Government postcards I'd brought from home so that, having written and addressed them, I could get three of them, plus a half-sheet letteron flimsy, into an envelope addressed to the addressee of the letter at home...
...And their scorn for common honesty—ah, the upright, or formerly upright, German—and their continuing admiration of the trickier than ever Nixon (extravagantly serialized in their most popular picture weekly...
...Vance off to Cairo, etc...
...it will lose its flavor in a month or two, but it won't have lost anything much...
...They will not interrupt their jabber with a fellow clerk to serve a customer, or install public toilets* public drinking fountains, or public telephones, or thank you if you don't leave a tip on top of the now universal 20 per cent service charge, or sell you a tomato, a shoelace, or a phaeton ten seconds after closingtime...
...It had been- closed, we learned on inquiry, for years...
...4. You can go to a foreign country whose language you understand but pretend not to and whose natives are neither (a) friendly, nor (b) intelligent, nor (c) nearby...
...House, in Revolt, Votes Tax-Cut Measure...
...Only you have to be something of a linguist or, as the French say, langouste...
...President Veelson, who didn't know the South Tyrol from the South Bronx, looked earnestly around the room and said, as he ¦^lways did, "The question, gentlemen, is what is the nationality of the people there...
...They will not move to let a person pass on the sidewalk...
...Liberty, equality, fraternity: Just try to cross the street in one of their white-striped pedestrian crosswalks or ask an idle kiosk operator to show you directions on your street map or get your neighbor to softpedal the piano...
...Louis, the best in all Paris, is closed, not May and June, not September and October, but July and August for M, B's two-month holiday...
...And the current social whirl: Princess Margaret, Banker on Holiday in Italy...
...Neither is it the fact that every Englishman who can make it out of Maggie (Attila the Hen) Thatcher's man-forsaken country retires in France instead of the Falklands...
...Second, because nobody would ever be able to contradict me on Montcuq, since nobody, but nobody, my dear, has ever been there...
...You know that the French no longer know how—or even why—to build Notre Dame...
...Our nearest neighbor, half a hilly mile away, is a socialist farmer (with a National Socialist attack dog to guard his property...
...OPEC Said to Weigh Price Rise...
...They laughed, in the big-dollar days, when I sat down in Belgrade, Kyoto, Teneriffe to trim the four sides of the 500 U.S...
...6. The dwelling you find is too far to walk to town, where, in any case, there are no diversions...
...If you keep moving, they can't hit you...
...a transformer from 110 to 220 plus extension cords and plugs for all the electrical equipment you are carrying, above all an electric hotplate...
...Image on Tortilla Draws Pilgrims...
...powdered coffee in quantity (in a plastic bag...
...The French...
...And the duchessa said, "The Banco di Roma got the Marshall Plan...
...You know all about the French...
...And I said, "Think of the Marshall Plan...
...They had a fire there...
...You carry your own luggage if it kills you—you said you wanted the secret of life, not the secret of immortality—and kill you it will if you carry every conceivable money-saving item with you: medicines and medicaments...
...Every man for himself and each against all...
...But this time around we have something to read—the International Herald Tribune, an excellent daily published in France by a New York Times-Washington Post combine and distributed by mail to the four corners of the four-cornered globe...
...for Montcuq, not Paris, is France, and to live in the suburbs of Montcuq is to live like God...
...They will not curb their dogs...
...9. You think about saving your money, and nothing else...
...And: "I'd be inclined to say"—this was Professor Robert Lekachman of City University of New York, August 5, 1978—"that we are in the middle of a prologue to a totally unnecessary, and entirely avoidable, economic tragedy—recession next year...
...They don't laugh any more...
...And what will you do if you are stricken in the middle of the night...
...You know that they now know how to build cultural Disneylands of Nineteenth Century iron like the Eiffel Tower and of Twentieth Century aluminum and resin like the Centre Pompidou of Paris...
...Baby and I, in our dead-of-winter quarters, with an immense room in a big old wooden summer resort, at $3.13 a day (including a bathtub in the midMilton Mayer is the roving editor of The Progressive...
...No Frenchman possessed of the secret of life would eat morning-fresh bread at noon...
...Senate Kills Hospital Cost Plan...
...The duchessa of the cafe wanted 200 lire for a cupful, and I opened negotiations by saying, "What...
...White Hope in South Africa: Birth Control for Blacks...
...their madness for life and death, for war memorials and truffles...
...Resilient, Hungry Insects Making World Comeback...
...Surely you realize that the secret of life is something more than merely staying alive...
...Germain, there were bits and pieces of Austria left over, among them the South Tyrol, whose inhabitants were 99 44/100 per cent Austrian...
...Martial Law Sft in Iranian City After 4 Die in Anti-Shah Riots...
...It was what we used, oh, so long before that, when we occupied the second-floor-front room at the Hotel de Nice on the Rue des Beaux Arts in the fashionable Sixth Aron-dissement of Paris at $2 a day even...
...So there are none of the horrors of the big city here in Montcuq, to divert a discoverer of the secret of life from discovering it...
...7. You live day after day...
...Their Boy Scouts get merit badges for knocking old ladies down on the subway steps and their Brownies get points for kicking cripples and running...
...He has blamed the violence on Communist influence...
...And the duchessa said, "And what all did you Americans do for me after the war...
Vol. 46 • September 1982 • No. 9
