Le chant des cigales
or,
It’s going to be a hot day
or,
An American girl spends the summer after Trump’s election in France and has a bunch of bullshit feelings about it
In the south of France, the trill of cicadas sounds almost mechanical, as if we are made privy to the hyper-amplified sound of electrical currents — pulses so perfectly even that they seem impossible, inorganic. Zzzzt. Zzzzt. Zzzzt.
It’s humid. I am covered with a damp film, as if I’m always ten minutes out from a swim. My hair curls impudently in the heat. I pull my skirt down, feeling a bit like Sisyphus when it scoots stubbornly up my ass. I charge through the streets with the long citygirl strides to which I am accustomed. I plot delicate escape routes around other tourists and their puttering athletic shoes and ineffectually-pocketed shorts.
It’s Nice, and it’s the tail end of June. The moon hangs low in the sky, a perfect half, as if God Himself sheared the other side off with a knife to eat with His café crème.
—
He has a moustache, the kind you grow when you know you’re cute enough to still be cute with a stupid moustache. He is the kind of rumpled, irreverent hipster I tumble into bed with embarrassingly often in Portland, and from across the three tables that his friends have pushed together, I squint and try to meet his eyes, assessing. I am warm with consideration, skin prickling with a potential challenge. But I am uninvested. I know pretty white boys like that go for dark yellow girls like me about fifty percent of the time. Maybe sixty percent before I start talking.
He glides across my face and starts to whisper in the ear of a skinny British demoiselle with airy ash-blonde fringe that crawls up in the middle to meet her forehead, thin lips, thin nose. I begrudge her nothing, though she carries the enchanted weight of a hundred eurocentric beauty standards that have nothing to do with me.
In my own ear, his friend buzzes like a persistent gnat, asks me where I’m from — California — no, where I’m really from — well, more recently, Portland — no, seriously, what’s your origin, as if that kind of ethnicity interrogation isn’t totally gauche and cliché. I could refer him to roughly one trillion thinkpieces, but he is from New Zealand and ethnically ambiguous himself. I roll my eyes, give a weak woof: “Guess.”
He searches me. I have the sort of skin my seventh grade Woodshop teacher unsolicitedly called “cinnamon. My favorite skin color on a girl.” Wide nose. Thick jut of lip, red now, rust usually. I am half-heartedly using makeup to cover a week-old scar that tore into the skin to the right of my philtrum. The wound’s edge settles with overzealous collagen in my dimple. Bike accident. It has deterred no one.
He says, “Filipina.” I shake my head. He insists, “You are.” I shake my head, narrow my eyes.
His shoulders turn feebly inward, knowing he’s pressed too far. Good.
—
This guy says he knows me and laughs. He doesn’t. I slide across the wood booth and my thighs squelch on the drinks of girls they’ve bought before me. Midnight sparkles overhead.
I say, by way of opening, “Many Americans didn’t want this to happen.”
The election, I mean.
His name is David (“Dahveed”) and probably he was at the top of his English class and still it is easier if I speak French.
I wear a black shift dress and sneakers. I know the effect I have, and I do not particularly pretend not to notice. Tonight, man after man has tediously placed a pleading Mademoiselllllle in the slope where my neck meets my shoulder. I shrug them off, give the classic once-over that ends in skeptically raised eyebrows. You’re dismissed.
I let my thighs squeak in the vodka Perrier. I say, “What do you think of Trump?”
They clamor over themselves to get a slice and when it becomes clear that I’m not fucking around and not sucking anyone’s dick after, they begin to disperse like spilled water.
—
She is a kind of soft butch dream from the early 2000s, sitting listlessly at an outdoor table with a man much older than her. I involuntarily turn completely around mid-step, almost falling on the cobblestone. My legs are crossed fetchingly and I make daring eye contact. She looks back blankly. If this were another essay, it could be about femme erasure in the French Riviera, which could be about femme erasure everywhere.
This alley is narrow, classic Vieux-Nice, bearing crumbling baroque details like sharp turns that appear from nowhere and frilly volutes practically dripping from balconies and archways. I turn forward into the night, forgotten laundry flapping overhead in the sticky Mediterranean heat.
—
I am walking when I almost begin to cry. In one warm wave, I have noticed how low my hackles are.
I am slight, the size of a tall fourth grader, and bronze skinned, unbelonging. In the States, I walk with the hum of low-level dread at every moment.
When I was twenty-two, an X-ray at the dentist revealed that my mandible bone was split down the middle. Trauma fracture. The hygienist held the black film up for me: I could see the way the crack looked like the tiniest vein on a leaf through my mâchoire. The mandible is that tough, beautiful bone that forms your jaw, giving way to your teeth, hinging into your skull on either side by coronoid process and notch and condyle.
I’d been punched square in the teeth by a man in the dark of a San Francisco night three weeks earlier. When I absorbed the blow and didn’t go down, he became irate, hit me again, and again. I’m the bitch who holds my ground like it’s my job. I hit him back, of course, woke up the next morning with his skin under my fingernails. I swallowed most of the blood rather than be seen spitting it.
The dental hygienists were aghast, told me to come back for surgery, but my American healthcare wouldn’t cover enough of it. I just let it heal as well as it could, fiddling absentmindedly with my tender accordioning teeth and icing my split lip, in wonderment at the way my cells stitched themselves back up. I cannot stop my tiny body from placing itself in harm’s way, stepping in front of menacing men at bars and marching straight into the fire time and time again. I wonder almost daily if I will anger the wrong asshole and end up dead. These are realities that come to pass often.
Violence and racism and all the corporeal trappings of kyriarchy exist in France, of course, but not the kind of wild Russian roulette you play every day walking out the door in America. I pay attention to the way my body feels at 2am. I don’t clutch keys, don’t shifty look behind me, don’t startle the same, don’t walk ankle-deep in venom, kicking up the acid spray. I glance distantly inside the bars and with each step carelessly let my short skirt slap against my thigh in the wind.
—
We try to find James Baldwin’s house for almost an hour. They’re trying to tear it down to build some condos. This is the house he died in, the house his landlady promised to him, but without the right paperwork. We have seen photos from other angles and wonder if we have the right one. It’s that Mediterranean salmon pink stucco. The day is so hot we feel like we’re walking through honey. We think this is it. It must be. It doesn’t have a number, but the adjacent houses tell us we’re close. On the mailbox, we read some stranger’s name, but also, in faded ballpoint pen, “Amis de Baldwin.” We’re outside the medieval village walls in the suburbs.
Tenth century St. Paul de Vence is perched on the hills in the Alpes Maritimes. Like little vines, the streets wind haphazardly to the top, coalescing into the point of a cone. Ivy and bougainvilleas hang heavily from the façades, sometimes eking toward the sun and growing taller than the apartments themselves. The stones that form the cobbled streets are turned sideways in skinny ovals and arranged to radiate like suns — it must have taken forever. The effect is breathtaking to behold, like you’re slipping your sandals and dripping your gelato into a Van Gogh painting.
But down here, down in front of maybe James Baldwin’s house, you’re in the olive trees and azaleas. A bathroom window is open on the wall facing the street. I’m too short to see anything except a painting of some flowers hanging on the opposite wall. I jump, then feel like an idiot for jumping. I go to peer through the fence, look at the garden, think about Baldwin’s writings on garden parties, about what it feels like to not be scared of dying every day like in America, what it feels like to sort of begin to feel at ease as a Black man, what it means to decide you don’t want to die in a country where you feel scared. You wanted to die in a pink house where you could throw a goddamn garden party. I put my hand on the wall for a long moment, feeling the surprising coolness, and will my thanks to penetrate through the stone.
—
They play the absolute worst music in the nightclubs here. Middling-top 40 hits from seven years ago come on at 1am and these otherwise normal Europeans go wild. It’s been a long while since I’ve felt the strained, distant feeling of being too cool for something, but I am too cool for this. Every night, no matter where we are, they play Macklemore and my eyes narrow to slits.
Tonight, that shit comes on while we are dancing on tables. The bar is trash. I disentangle myself from the group, cross my arms, decide to wait it out. In this moment, a British guy introduces himself to me as a Magic Mike dancer. I don’t even know what to say. My sister hisses to me that he is objectively the hottest guy at the bar right now. I look at the little Hollister seagull perched taut on the pectoral slope of his shirt, look at his arms, look at his face. My eyes are still narrow. But I need to know what the fuck he means by that.
He uses phrases like “in my line of work” and “on this leg of the tour” and adds casual details over the din of awful music, calling a fellow dancer over, commiserating over inside jokes. I actually start to believe him. When a drunk German dude gets too close to us, he politely and decisively pushes him off a table. So masculinity has its uses after all.
On Tuesday, I win a dance-off against a fly 19-year-old French kid. He and his friends bow to me. They’re adorable, maybe two years out of high school, all in streetwear that’s been impeccably pressed, four brown boys about six feet tall. You just know they were running errands for their aunties all day and came here to show off the dancing that they’ve been doing since they were prepubescent. Against the polite wall of them, I feel stupid small in my teeny black sandals and hoops. I bow back.
The DJ plays “Thrift Shop,” and I think I will never forgive France. The song after that is “Crazy in Love,” and I immediately forgive France. I take my hair out of its ponytail, shake it out, yell the lyrics flat and joyful at my friends.
The French people around me know about every tenth word but make euphonic sounds and furrow their eyebrows gamely.
—
The Promenade des Anglais is that dramatic main drag along the waterfront. The prominent Negresco Hotel has an old-timey matte glow and the faint sounds of jazz can be heard outside its gilded twelve-foot doors until midnight.
An elaborate construction project restoring the huge palm trees that line the median is underway. They look both ghastly and feeble, palm fronds tied up into 180° ponytails so as not to be knocked over by the wind, cedar four-by-fours wedged at 45° angles between the inside curb and trunk to keep ’em from tipping over. I imagine that their roots must be weak.
The traffic takes forever. We bring a bottle of red from Bourgogne and little gifts from home. I always bring gifts. I hear the voice of my mother as I pick them out. Something light enough to fit in your suitcase, something special enough so they feel the weight of your love twenty and thirty and forty years from now.
—
When we first meet, you tell me that I could be colombiana. Your lips bend perfectly around the word — crisp, unaccented Spanish. My heart heaves when you switch languages like this. Even with my hairs raised in defense at this racial guessing game, I begin to internally wax romantic at the sheer amount of words you must know. Tell me I’m pretty and quickwitted in French, Portuguese, in English, in Spanish, in Italian.
A beat passes, and in this room of mostly brown people, I shrug lightly, say, “Yeah, people can never decide what I am. I’ve gotten colombiana before — y peruana, y mexicana también.” I grin and raise a shoulder. “Quel beau compliment.” Your colloc Adrián takes a moment and affirms the Colombian thing. I feel the eyes of the room on me. In the States, I do get Mexican a lot, and Pacific Islander, too. My best guess is that I get assigned whatever non-white race that’s common in a given geographic area. In Portland, when white Americans see my dark hair, non-Anglo nose, tan skin even in winter, they say “Mexican” without a particularly wide range of light brown folks in their imaginations.
Colombian seems so specific — I wonder if there happens to be a high density of Colombian folks in France and this is why you jump to categorize me with these people who are Other. We could very well be Other together. Or maybe you have a wider spectrum of experience and really do think I have uniquely Colombian traits. I don’t know. What do I know? Rien.
The Colombian diaspora is huge in France, I later learn, probably brain drain due to the long-running armed conflict with roots in La Violencia of 1948, the assassination of populista Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and resulting neoliberal interventionist shitshow — Cold War, War on Drugs, badly-executed counterinsurgeny efforts. France is the seventh largest country of emigration; there’re more Colombians in France than in Mexico or Argentina or even Brazil, which shares a border to the southeast.
Making sense of the comparison is a fool’s errand, of course. Ethnocentric nationalism is bullshit, and all races are basically everywhere. A week after you call me colombiana, I almost weep at the baptism of my friend’s son in the pocket-sized Église de la Sainte Thérèse a mile up from the étang de Thau in Sète. An ancient tapestry on the stage of the crumbling building reveals a black Jesus, morose and beautiful. I am overcome with a wistful tenderness at the sight of him rendered in rich brown paint. Incidentally, Sète is also the city where a bartender at a bizarre Pirates of the Caribbean-themed bar tells me out of the blue that I look Colombian. I tell him no, I’m American, but I’m not particularly proud to be American right now. He guffaws, says in that nasal accent du sud, “We know that shit’s not your fault. You tried.” He says, “You really don’t look American.” Of course I don’t. I am Other. I am reminded of this every time someone speculates about my origins.
In the kitchen, Adrián says, “I hate when Americans say ‘Columbian.’” He is a savant, a PhD student from Argentina studying engineering. His English is fucking unbelievable and he insists he owes everything he knows to the Wu Tang Clan.
I ask him what he thinks of our political situation, and he says in a perfect deadpan, in beautiful English, “Let me guess: You love Trump and everything he stands for, as do I.”
I am drinking wine out of a tiny glass jar that once held yogurt or a store-bought pot de crème. This is my third glass and his comment is hilarious. I crow with laughter.
I explain in rapidfire my theory that the new American Alt-Right borrowed strategies from the douchey, hair-slicked-back, pseudo-intellectual young people of the Extrême droite, the well-educated Neo Nazi hipsters in Germany, the far-right supporters of Marine Le Pen. Her party, the Front National, wants to leave the European Union, go back to the French franc, and block all immigrants in a floundering effort to salvage jobs. I have asked almost everyone I’ve met about this phenomenon, and again and again, they are blank, say that they haven’t heard of this parallel. They defensively tell me that France isn’t racist. Puhleeze.
At last, in this kitchen, everyone says, “Yeah, yeah, that’s totally happening.”
You say that in the north of France, it was really a question of jobs — that Le Pen had somehow promised that everyone would make more than one thousand Euros a month. Bullshit and chicanery. Here in the south, though, you say that rich people who knew better supported the FN. They knew the history of the party — we talk about the way Jean-Marie Le Pen, papa dearest to Marine, tried to minimize the impact of the Nazi occupation of France, calling the gas chambers a “small detail of World War II” in the 80s and 90s. Marine threw him under the bus and hijacked the party. Les riches knew the history, and they knew Marine Le Pen was full of folly, and they didn’t care. Taxes.
You tell me you think Trump is like a kid carelessly playing Monopoly while his advisors do the real damage, and I twinkle at you, smile with the apples of my cheeks and wrinkle my nose affectionately. You are a bit skittish, hoping your analysis flies. It does, I tell you. Smart, I tell you.
Adrián says, “Come here. Let me show you something.” I follow him through the apartment to his bedroom, where a page torn very carefully from a magazine is taped to the door. It is Marine Le Pen. Campaign ad. It originally said, all caps, “CHOISIR LA FRANCE!” The F and the N in FRANCE have been meticulously blacked out so it reads, “CHOISIR LA RACE!”
You made it for him the first week he moved in, a joke for Adrián’s radical politics.
I lose it. Here at 10pm in this little apartment in the south of France, after wine number four, it is the funniest thing I have ever seen.
My sweet friend Octavio, the one I’m here to visit, tells me that in his home country, Trump made the Mexican president, “socialist”-centrist Enrique Peña Nieto, look good by comparison — “But!” He holds up his mug of wine, slurring the first word, “He’s a motherfucker!” It’s just that Trump is a slightly more obvious motherfucker, and someone to unite against. He says he hopes that Mexicans don’t become distracted and forget about their own shitty cards.
I say, “Yes!” I shake my head. “That’s my fear in the States, too — that we get comfortable. We are already normalizing shit. It’s not normal.”
He says that when EPN The Motherfucker was first elected, people protested in the streets for a while but eventually calmed down — especially those who were fearful after the 43 Mexican student activists vanished in Ayotzinapa en route to a demonstration. “When they disappeared, people got scared of being in the streets.”
Stupidly, I ask, “Still no answers, right?”
With a sigh, he says, “Still no answers.”
“Fuck.”
But elections are next year, he says, and an indigenous activist muxer is talking about running for president. María de Jesús Patricio Martínez — querida Marichuy.
Wine four and a half. I let out a high-pitched squawk of delight.
He says, “Yeah, she’s testified in front of the UN Council for Indigenous Rights — and having a woman candidate, let alone an indigenous woman candidate…that’s a big deal.”
Octavio tells me that he used to think I was too radical, but that he’s come around and has wanted to thank me for years. It’s wine number four and three quarters and my eyes fill with tears. I say, “Thank you, thank you” and hug him. My old friend. My old friend, may we grow with each other for years to come. I tell him croakily that I want to burn everything down, that the systems that be have failed the people, that he should burn it with me.
He smiles so kindly, and I look around the room. You look back at me for a second too long. I say, “Hey. Let’s go dance.” On y go.
—
The sea is warm and saltier than I remember it being and my Bad Sandy shirt is soaked. I don’t know if we kissed on the rocks before kissing here in the water, ankles circling each other like sharks, or the other way around. It’s 3am and our friends laugh and splash on the shoreline but we are on the fourth buoy. I push my hoops further into my ears, willing them not to fall out. I imagine them catching the moonlight and glinting gold one last time before they drift to and fro in the placidity of the Mediterranean, settling beneath our toes with a million years of lost earrings and pocket change.
The salt water meets my eyes and I roll over on my back so I’m looking up at that lush night sky, one day from revealing the tiny top slice that will complete this full moon in Capricorn, stars and planets beating down on us with their unspeakable luminosity. The reflection of the moon on the water is such a profound white, gleaming on an impossibly wide spread of waves.
You live with our friends across the street from the Promenade, just rock beach and two lanes of traffic separating you from the sea, and we snatch my jeans from the shore and run back barefoot, cutting a careless angle across the street, laughing, hands in each other’s hair. The lobby is beautiful, vintage, completely mirrored, and I steal a glance at myself in the dark as we tiptoe up the stairs. I drip saltwater from my black skein of hair onto the marble. My skin begins to feel raw from the profound salinity, but I pull you to me, or you pull me to you, and I let myself taste the salt transfer on our soft summer cheeks.
—
In the morning, I wake early. I admire the grain of the wall. I think my mascara must be everywhere, but you look at me so sweet and fond and I forgive you for smoking cigarettes through the slats in the window. We talk about meeting at the art museum in the afternoon, and I think about how it would be a miracle if I made it back out for such a civilized activity. But I know I will see you tonight. And we are a longshot to begin with.
Hours stretch and we can hear market sounds. I dress in what feels like an instant Cinderella whirl, give up on finding my socks — one on your floor, one still on the beach, I’m sure — slip my feet straight into boots, and walk out into a fucking wedding. What are the odds.
I feel haggard. I raise a hand to shade my eyes as I walk through the Esplanade Georges Pompidou, where people in formalwear have lined either side of the sidewalk to celebrate the couple. There is nowhere else to walk. Professional photographs are being taken. I stomp straight through in all black, hair still wet, dead center, smirk tugging at my mouth, trying not to laugh.
—
The next night, I tell you quietly that I knew right away you were cute. I always hear my voice go high, almost comically high, when I say risky things like this. My voice is already an octave higher when I speak French. I cringe at myself, but I’m goofy happy, the moonlight pouring in through those Marie Antoinette casement windows that must be ten feet tall. I can’t believe how high the ceilings are in this apartment. The room is tiny, and you have laundry slung on the chair next to the bed. Later I see you peel back a few layers for a clean tee-shirt.
You groan, say that cute or nice are things we say when we can’t think of anything more notable about a person. I am delighted that this sentiment exists in French, too, just as I am delighted by every cross-lingual parallel. Cultural cognate. It soothes that foolish part of me that still finds disproportionate sweetness in every proof of human commonality. I say, “Désolée, mais t’es mignon et t’es sympa.”
I hear the high chirrup of a bird and know it’s almost dawn. We are so new, and you still adjust your body with such care, predicting exactly the way I will straighten up, look down at you in this pale blue light, and slump in a huff against your chest, bringing cool air with the speed of my collapse. I ask, “What is it that you hope people think about you?”
You sigh, uncharacteristically flustered, answer me in English. “Just, that, I don’t know. That I’m open-minded.”
You try to convince me, like every night, that there’s lots of work for me as a journalist in France, that politics are chaud here too. I allow myself to dream of a different life where I write about Franco-American relations from some sweet balcony we rent together, where the croissants you bring me now are just the first in a string of a million croissants you would bring me every day. Wiping sleep from your bleary eyelashes before even a sip of your morning café, you slip sandals on to dart to a boulangerie just below us, bringing back pastries so warm and fresh that when you place them in front of me, they give a little bit, like they’re breathing.
—
The cicadas in Sète are about the loudest I’ve ever heard. From Mapi’s patio, hanging from a cypress tree, one screeches incessantly as I take my morning tea.
“They’re not singing — it’s their legs,” says Mapi. “This is how you know it’s going to be hot today.”
It’s a strange non sequitur, I think, to assure me that the cicadas are not singing. I don’t get too bogged down by it. I am overcome with the value of earth knowledge and I thank the cicadas for telling me what they know.
Fred — Frédérique — is Mapi’s best friend from when she was my age, high cheekbones and full lips, willowy and approximately eleven feet tall.
Fred is interested in America, curious about whether there are actually people who support Trump. She worries that perhaps everyone really does love him.
I say, “The country is so large — I don’t support him, and most of the people in my part of the country don’t support him.” The disconnect is so vast between parties and voters, and the logic of the Electoral College eludes Fred and Mapi, who roll their eyes and say, “It’s just not fair. If it were like that in France, no one would want to vote, their vote wouldn’t mean anything.” I tell them that lots of people agree with them. I tell them that this has allowed deep fractures between ideologies to come to a head in a really ugly way. I tell them that Portland thinks of itself as one of the most progressive cities in the country, but that earlier this summer, two men were stabbed and killed on our railway system for attempting to defend a Muslim hijabi girl from an extremist. I search for the language in French to convey the word “embolden.” I say that people who once thought they would be unpopular for their xenophobia now feel brave enough to let it show.
Fred interrupts me, says, “Yes, this is what I fear — that he is a danger to everyone.”
She can’t understand how this election happened, how Republicans would let this happen. Right centrists in France shuddered at the idea of electing someone from the Front National — they jumped ship and voted for center left Macron rather than be associated with her extremism.
I say, “They didn’t like him at first, and they feared for the future of the party at first, but they refused to let another on the left remain in office. And they really, really hated Hillary.”
Fred shakes her head. “They’re going to ruin it for themselves. No one will ever vote for the right again.”
I say, “Oh, yes, they certainly will. This isn’t the death of the Republican party.”
Fred insists, says that because Socialist president François Hollande was pretty ineffectual (she uses the words “removed” and “distant” to describe him), even folks on the left said, “Okay, Socialist party? Never again!”
I note that Trump is almost like a separate party — the Alt-Right is not quite mainstream Republican. And in a two party system, we don’t really have the luxury to say, “Never again” to an entire party.
Fred thinks this is clearly outlandish. She says, “Dangerous.”
I know she’s right. Instead of starting over, the center of a party that won’t die is pulled further and further toward the fringe.
Drunk on the deck that night, she says, “Mapi nowadays is the one with everything under control, but she was the sexy one, the pin-up — and I was — what?” We struggle to think — eventually we agree, “Fred was the adventurer, the optimist.”
Fred tells this story: When they were in their early twenties, they were at a party in Toulouse. Mapi remembers that she had taken forever to do her makeup and get ready, and Fred met a guy. They had a strong connection, and suddenly he said, “You know what? I’m really in the mood to go to the beach.” Fred said, “Cool, great.” He replied, “Do you want to go?”
What, now?
Yes.
Yes.
Now.
And so they went. They got in the car and drove 150 kilometers by morning. And they went to the goddamn beach.
Mapi cackles, says, “Yeah, I would never do that.”
I smile at her, say, “Life is long.”
We’re drinking the leftover champagne from the baptism, bottle after bottle.
Mapi’s been divorced, now lives with her partner Jean, unmarried. Doesn’t see the need. Ten year anniversary coming up in December. We talk about my relationships — she met me when I was twenty-two, and I’ve learned about one million True Fuckin’ Facts About Life from the loves I’ve had since the last time I was sleeping on the guest futon in her basement. I tell her what it feels like to have true, deep doubts in my heart of hearts, tell her that that’s been my cue to leave. I say I am trying to be understanding when people have those true, deep doubts about me. In English, for emphasis, she turns to me with wet eyes and says, “I’ll tell you this about love: when you know, you know.”
Slowly, I say back, “Yes. When you know, you know.”
She drinks out of a free champagne flute that a French department store gave her a zillion years ago as a promotion. She has dozens of these free champagne flutes, enough for the whole baptism party this afternoon. She swallows. “The second you start asking yourself questions, it’s already over. The second you start to wish that a person is different, it’s over. You don’t want to change the right person. It gets hard, but you want to keep at it, you don’t need to convince yourself. When it’s right, you just know.”
We say in unison, me and Fred and Mapi, “When you know, you know.”
Mapi puts her hand on Jean’s.
It’s eleven. Fireworks begin to go off on the étang below us — we are shocked. Even in this ritzy Château Vert neighborhood, Mapi is unbound, free, jubilant. She whoops, “VIIIIIVE LA BALARUUUUUUC!”
Fred whispers, “I think she thinks this is a neighborhood celebration.”
We grab the kids, grab the dog, scramble around the thicket of trees blocking our view, cram onto the balcony at the other end of the house to catch the fireworks over the lagoon. We are a jocund gaggle, standing on tiptoes, jostling elbows. Mapi says, in English, “Jean, we have to cut the tree.” Jean says, “Quoi?” He doesn’t speak English. I translate. He rolls his eyes. The Balaruc neighborhood crew do not fuck around — the show is impressive, and extends long into the night. We hear the fireworks whistle and pop from all the way at the top of the hill.
We laugh and hoot and catcall the neighbors.
Fred’s son is seven, and he assesses each firework carefully, informing me solemnly of the colors he expects to see, then confirming or amending. I say, “Oh, they’re beautiful.”
He responds, “They’re okay.”
I howl, “NO, THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL!” and he grins sheepishly at me as I shake his shoulders, letting the magic of it settle like the reflections of the colors in the sky onto his little face.
—
Something comes over me when I see the first vineyards just outside of Mèze.
Something visceral, like the strange zero-gravity feeling of unexpectedly seeing someone you used to love — you know, being happy that you’re not with them anymore, but sad that they don’t love you anymore either. The grass grows wild and dry, the grapevines lush and overgrown, as if touching fingers with neighboring plants, the most intimate sweetness. I used to walk in the grapevines outside of Pézenas with that long grass constantly getting caught in my shoelaces and socks, swifts swirling slowly and deliberately overhead doing whofuckingknowswhat.
It’s so bright that it makes me tired. My eyelids involuntarily slump. Jean chatters beside me. The radio chatters under him. When I’m alone in the car, sometimes I’ll strike myself on the thigh or forearm to keep awake, an act that’s a little sexy and a little vulgar in just the ways that I like. I am sure this would disturb Jean, so when I instinctively raise my left hand to right arm, I falter, deciding after a hitch in time to cross my arms and deliver a covert pinch to the soft skin just below the shoulder joint. It doesn’t work. I close my eyes and they prick with tears at the unrelenting force of the Hérault sun, glowing pink through the blood and pulp of my eyelids.
—
In the car much later that afternoon, Olivier tells me that cicadas are so typique in the south that when Parisiens make fun of the region, they often put that unmistakable screech in the background. He says lightly, with the musical lilt of subtle French sardonicism, “Le chant des cigales.” I understand Mapi all at once and my pulse quickens with the rush of learning a secret. We don’t say that the cicadas sing in English, but maybe we should. I roll the window down to hear with something like the profound clarity of being dropped into a jar with a thousand cicadas in bamboo.
—
I have a crème at Café des Arts just like old times. When we order, Cécile tells the owner that I used to work at the school three years ago. I tell him that I remember him, that I used to come here all the time. He welcomes me back magnanimously, and I feel a twinge. He is affable but clearly doesn’t remember me. Against all odds, I thought that perhaps he would.
Cécile and Éloise and I walk through the little streets and I marvel at how little the village has changed. A fountain of Marianne, lady of the république, towers over the main square. She grips a quiver of thunderbolt-jagged arrows in her raised hand that reads: DROITS DE L’HOMME. Cécile tells me, “Toi, tu es militante” and I grin at her — she is so normal and blonde and middle class, and I know she’s terribly proud of me and my politics. I love her. She bids me to stand in front of the statue with my arm up so she can take a photo. I feel true and tough and very like myself with my feet on these streets again.
Olivier and I go alone to Carrefour to buy cheese for dinner. We look at the newspaper stand and he tells me which are shit, which are sensible. He says to me, “Look, he’s even here in the supermarket.” A drab, brown paperback called Trump par Trump sneers up at me, and I groan and flip it over.
—
Incredibly, in Nézignan-l’Évêque, I fuck up the bisous every time. I used to be so good at this. When I returned to the States in 2014, I couldn’t stop kissing people on the cheek, felt very mal à l’aise hugging. Maybe I’ve never fully recovered, byproducts of a childhood without much physical affection and the disappointing arbitrariness of embraces in general. A hug feels so much less elegant, so casual, and the ritual of the bisous is predictable, light, merry, like overhearing laughter from the other side of a tiled house, or the first sip of an especially good prosecco.
I keep starting on the wrong side and have doubts about how many to do: two in Nice? Two in Sète? No, three? And three here. Three. Starting. On the. Right? Left?
When children kiss me, they put their lips squarely on the hollows of my cheeks, and on the other side, I let the corner of my mouth barely graze their babysoft skin, pursing my lips in the air, my new scar stretching taut.
—
On the train to Marseille, a young man, maybe twenty three, waits behind me for the toilet. The handle reads red, “Occupied,” one of my favorite commonplace examples of intuitive design. After all, it’s jarring when someone tries to open the door with your panties around your ankles. Anxious types (read: me) see their lives flash before their eyes imagining that the knob-rattler might manage to knock the locking system askew in an act of extreme strength or extreme shit luck.
This young man does the thing I hate and ignores the intuitively designed door. He rattles the doorknob and swears. I blink. He rattles it again and I say, using the informal tu construction (although the formal vous can give you the gift of distance, I have a rule: always tutoyé a scrub), “Regards — c’est occupé.” I touch my finger to the red circle.
He hadn’t noticed me before, not particularly, but now he looks at me in a specific way. You know the one. His hair is gelled in that south of France fuckboy pouf.
The door opens. I almost think that if I waited a beat, he would feel entitled to cut in front of me. I would let that happen Over My Cold, Dead Body™.
Later, although we were in different compartments, he stands behind me in the corridor as we wait for the train to come to its cushiony halt.
Sometimes when you cross someone’s path twice by chance, you begin to think it’s a romantic whim of fate. He looks at me as if to say, “Do you feel it? The whim? Of fate?” I let my eyes roll dispassionately out the window.
He does that other thing I hate — stands too close behind me so his body presses against mine. To escape his Giorgio Armani tee-shirted chest, I advance an inch or two although no one else has moved. We do this dance two, then three times. I decide to lift a sandaled foot and let it hover in the air just so, and when he takes an aggressive step into my space, he gives himself a flat tire and trips.
—
When another TGV passes your TGV, there’s a brief, otherworldly SKREEEEEEEEEK that happens, like a banshee is being torn apart in the vacuum. You think you’re going to die.
—
On the bus to Nice, I am so hungover that I am almost breathless. I need a mint. I think about the wine I’m about to buy and say a prayer. Rosé. Dry. Maybe a Bandol. Hail Mary, full of grace. Help me.
Boarding in Vence, a bespectacled mother drops her bespectacled boy off. He is slight, eight or nine years old, Harry Potter in the cupboard skinny, superfine hair just too long to be considered a bowl cut anymore. I create a backstory that is familiar to me. He is pained to leave his maman in the way that all kids of divorce are when they switch houses.
He presses his face to the window to blow kisses and I get a pang of warmth beneath my breastplate. She blows kisses back, and when the bus begins to pull away, she follows us to the rond point where a gaggle of irreverent teenagers are biking shirtless in the heat at the height of rush hour. The boy mouths, “Je t’aime, je t’aime” at maman through the glass.
I think about how mouthing “I love you” in English seems so comprehensible, the shapes formed by our lips so distinct, so legible. “Je t’aime” is just a purse of the lips and a quick pulling back to bare your teeth — not so obvious. Could be a dozen phrases, maybe.
I feel suddenly very anglophone and my cheeks heat with shame. I don’t know shit. Maybe every language’s “I love you” forms the most easily recognizable shapes in our tender little human mouths.
The boy is quiet and over the course of the long bus ride produces the plastic figurine of a red Angry Bird from his turtle shell backpack. It is roughly the size of a large mango or a small cantaloupe.
A full stop early, the boy stands up, vigilant but well versed in his routine.
In a village called La Colle sur Loup, a man waits in the shade of the bus stop in a splashy green graphic tee.
My breath hitches.
It is papa, I’m sure. I’m sure. I feel the boy fidget and edge closer to the door.
I try to make my facial expression flatten out, but I am beaming. I love this boy. I love his fucked up family.
The doors open and the boy’s papa meets him, eagerly stepping off the curb with his arm extended, beaming too.
In St. Paul de Vence, the empty bus becomes crowded. A group of five middle-aged Americans travel together — three black, two white. They wear polo shirts, beaded flip flops, expensive but uncool sunglasses. The two black women board first, sit in the first of four seats facing each other. The white woman says, “Oh, I’m gonna need to sit there, sorry.” Motionsickness, presumably.
I think they may be close enough to speak to one another like this, but I detect a flicker of annoyance cross the first woman’s face. Don’t tell me to move, Linda. Ask politely, at least. My lightskinned ass is the only other person of color on this bus so far. I look at the first woman to give her a conspiratorial Wink of Color. She doesn’t look at me.
I wonder why I’m so on edge. This is not my fucking business.
An Irish couple sits behind me and I begin to despise them.
Pulling away from St. Paul, the husband says, “It really doesn’t look like anything special from here.” I balk. Moments before, I’d taken a shitty photo on my phone, so moved by the city, a floating castle on a hill. Spectacular. I roll my eyes. Really?
The wife says, “I dunno, I still think it looks special.”
The husband makes a small harumphing sound.
He drones on, the lower edges of his voice dipping to blend in with the hum of the bus.
Twenty minutes pass. Just before the airport, he says, “See, look where the river is, it’s so low. It’s only a quarter of what it could be.” Kinda like your personality, dude, I think.
The wife doesn’t respond.
We cross the airport. He says, “Look, the airport.”
The wife doesn’t respond.
I look away. I catch the tail end of him saying, “Young people just don’t get it. Maybe it’s because they’re always at the bar.” I get everything and also I’m going to be at a bar in T-minus thirty minutes, I think.
“A lot of people use ‘the Midas touch’ as a misnomer because they don’t know the story,” he says. In detail, he incorrectly explains the myth of King Midas. He finishes drably, “And that’s where the phrase ‘the Midas touch’ comes from.”
An older woman sits down and chats to the people next to her. I recognize the beautiful fabrics she’s wearing as West African, probably from somewhere on the Côte d’Ivoire.
A few stops later, a man sits down next to me. They don’t know each other, of course. We all sit peacefully ignoring each other for fifteen minutes. Suddenly, without ever having exchanged words, the woman begins to guffaw with the man. They talk to each other in what I think might be Hausa. I recognize a few words tossed in — “portable,” and “Google.” They could not be cuter, both cracking up, taking deep breaths halfway through sentences to regain oxygen. The woman translates for the nice white lady sitting next to her — she is talking about her phone, about accidentally Googling stuff when voice-to-text picks her up mid-conversation.
The man is still chuckling next to me. He wears a blue tie-dyed blouse and khaki everything. On his left wrist is a bronze bracelet carved out of intersecting X-es.
The construction on the Promenade is making the traffic awful, just like every night this summer. In three different languages, the people around me discuss how late they all are. What on earth is going on? Will they lose their reservations? Would it be quicker to walk from here? But where are we?
I zone back into the Irish couple when I hear the wife say about something, “You’re right.”
The husband responds, “Of course I’m right.”
I smother a laugh and it sounds like a choke. The man in tie-dye smiles sympathetically at me.
In front of me, the American guy in the bad sunglasses asks, “Have we passed the Negresco yet?”
We haven’t.
A beat.
We pass the Negresco.
The Irish husband says, “Look, the Negresco.”
—
You ask what the word for this is, for tracing collarbones and the backs of arms and hip bones. Paper delicate. I forget the word for caress and say “butterfly touch.” This is the word we use at my job, an elementary school, to talk about the ways we allow children to touch each other: a butterfly touch is gentle, not meant to harm. Other schools I’ve worked at have outlawed any contact whatsoever for fear of liability, but here, we know that humans are meant to collide, especially as our bodies clank along trying to figure each other out.
Like a kid, you repeat back to me, “Butterfly touch.” And touch me — butterfly touch me.
You say it’s much prettier than the French word.
You tell me low and quiet that I have les mains douces, your voice thick with emotion, muffled by the pillow.
—
Even with the blinds closed, it gets so hot in your room in the morning. You bring in your roommate’s fan and adjust it on a pile of books just so, making very sure that its breeze hits me. I always wake up early when I’m not in my own bed, fidgeting and drinking water and standing aimlessly in the kitchen every half hour starting at 7. You doze, but concernedly ask me if I’m okay each time. And each time, I kiss your sweet elbow, your sweet temple, your sweet shoulder, smile, and say I’m fine, I’m fine, go back to bed.
Later, I sneak into your room while you make coffee and slip a letter onto your bed, balance it half on your desk, half on your pillow so it forms the roof of a triangle. When I return to the kitchen, you say with rehearsed casualness, like you’ve been trying to get it out all morning, that maybe we can go to the beach this afternoon before my flight. I think you know how improbable this is. I say, “All my shit — I don’t know — “ and you smile sadly at me. You know.
When it’s time for me to leave, I say, “Okay.” You are nervous, ask me if I’ve forgotten anything in your room. You start to walk back there, stalling, and I grab you, tell you I’ve double checked. I don’t want to see you find the letter. I have drawn a moon and a palm tree on thick watercolor paper, torn messily out of my sketchbook on the train. I want you to find it later this afternoon when you start to miss me. I want you to smell me in your bed. I’d brought your tee-shirt in my little backpack to return to you, but at the last minute, I decide to keep it.
Incredibly, I fuck up our last bisous.
I am so nervous about whether we kiss on the mouth or the cheeks now, trying so hard to be cheerful. You say, “Well, we have these beautiful memories now — “ and I say, “Yes, of course — and come visit me — ” and you say, “Yes, of course” and I say, “Well — okay — ” and we move toward each other at the same time, like two clumsy birds trapped in a closet. I kiss you once on the mouth, once on the cheek, and smile strangely at you, letting my eyes unfocus.
—
I buy my mother a ceramic bowl at the marché des fleurs. The walk back to the train station feels like it takes forever. I don’t even feel my legs.
I buy my silly two euro ticket and sit on a stone block in the waiting room. It’s hot and smells like cigarettes. It’s a fucking zoo. I feel totally still in my sadness and my gratitude.
A little boy, five or six years old, comes right up to me and hands me a piece of long paper, like a thick receipt. He tells me it’s a story — a science fiction story. I thank him ardently. He says, “Look, it tells you at the bottom how long it will take to read. This one is five minutes.” He tells me that if I want to read one of a different length, he will get it for me. I tell him this one is perfect, that I love science fiction. He glows with happiness. I thank him again, call him monsieur.
There’s a piano, and a man begins to play old French classics. The crowd gathers in ebullient spirits and sings along. Maybe twenty or thirty people singing.
I swing my feet on the stone block, roll the little boy’s story around my fingers. I think my heart may brim over and leak all over the floor.
—
On the first leg home, I sit next to a young Asian couple — Chinese, I think, but they are French, or at least they’ve lived here a while. And very rich. I’ve been eavesdropping on them since we began to huddle disorganizedly near the gate in the Nice airport.
The flight attendant is a charismatic young man — very funny, very at ease with the passengers. He comes by to explain to us that this is the emergency exit aisle and we’ll have to help get everyone the fuck out if this puppy goes down. He is also Asian ethnically and French nationally. Here we are: four Asians. Three French. One American. All francophone.
We exchange bonsoirs. He turns to the couple next to me and, in a subtle sleight of microagression, doesn’t bother to ask if they can speak French — he asks if they speak English, which they do. He explains in English. He turns to me and says, “Alors.”
—
The sun rises slowly slowly slowly and then all at once over Charles de Gaulle. I look away from the ropy glass windows for thirty seconds and when I look back, the gears in my brain produce euphoric references to the Odyssey’s rosy-fingered dawn. I imagine she is gently butterfly touching her way to me, where I sit fairly miserably with my feet aloft on my luggage. I think of Odysseus evading Circe and fighting the cyclops, all to get home to sweet Penelope who loves him madly and will never give up and never stop unraveling her burial shroud, and I think this is approximately how I feel about my bed. I am getting sicker and sicker by the minute with a flu of dubious origins. I think about the mosaic at the top of the Colline du Château in Nice: Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage.
The aiport fucks up my flight and my trip home doubles in length and cost. I feel almost hysterical, like the country of France is conspiring to keep me, and I want to give in. You win. I’ll live here forever in a beautiful dream, you fucker.
At border control in Atlanta, a real fratty-looking guy says, “Well, I just don’t think it’s right that non-US citizens have more lines open than US citizens.” The reason for this is very logically of course that it takes longer to look at visas and passports from other countries. (United States residents have creepy automated facial-recognition scanners now, so in my disgusting travel dishevelment, I pray that I look enough like myself.) This dude wears Sperry’s, salmon shorts, a blue polo, hair cut at precise and unflattering angles. And you know when full lips look smarmy on a white guy?
At this point, fever sweat matting my hair, capillaries on my shoulders busted open bloody from the weight of my backpack, I cannot stop myself from fully laughing out loud and saying, “Chill.”
His mouth falls open like a fish.
Welcome back, baby.
—
On le quatorze juillet, you text me from the patio of your maman’s house outside Montpellier, which is where I lived the last time around. You say that next time you’ll take me here. You tell me it’s peaceful— not like the Promenade. I imagine that you say this extremely vulnerable thing with ease, a kind of no-brainerness with affection that makes my guarded head spin. You ask me when I’m coming to visit and I tell you I’m looking at flights now, see you in twenty minutes.
I have always been superstitious about wishing. In the darkest years of our life, my sister and I would wish like a religion. Without hope coming from any tangible sources, we treated wishes like a sacred currency. We’d write them down every 11:11 and put the slips of paper in a glass bottle on the windowsill, wishing for housing stability, for the rent check to clear, for happiness, for the pain of our mother to ease, for love to come looking for us. I still hold my breath in tunnels, still note every time the clasp of my necklace makes its way to the front of my chest, still pick a perfect puff of dandelion to blow upon. For all my practicality and cynicism, I still wish, believing some kind of beauty to emerge from the permission you give yourself to utter your profoundest desires with clarity. Put your heart in one sentence and read what beats for you. Be lucid with your dreams.
The grammatical construction of “I wish” is tough in both French and English. I learned the French subjonctif in AP French VI, a high school class where the three highest levels of kids were squished into one stuffy room. I wish I could. I wish you were. Subjunctive past versus auxiliary words with simple infinitive. It’s a mess.
Every time we talk now, we switch between French and English, and we wish with each other. I wish I was there with you. I wish I could see you. I wish.
I had a shitty seat on the plane for my flight home, one spot from the outside of the center row. I was on an otherworldly stratum of exhaustion, and I cupped the chin of my fevered head in my hand, putting all of the weight on my elbow. I pinched a nerve between my skinny little bones and the rubber armrest. My fingertips went completely numb.
For days after, the tips of my fingers refused to come back and my ears wouldn’t pop. When anything begins to go wrong with me, I prepare for the worst. I’m a worst case scenario kinda girl. I wondered if I might be numb forever, if I might never feel someone’s skin on these fingertips again. Sounds entered my ears as if from underwater, ordinary things distorted like whale song. I opened my mouth to yawn artificially. They would pop for a moment and seal again.
It has been weeks. The feeling has come back in my fingers, but that nerve in my elbow twinges with pain still. I massage it alone in my bed late at night with the lights off, wincing in the darkness. The little fucked up part of me that can’t accept that sometimes good things just happen rationalizes that perhaps we pay penance for flying too close to the sun.
—
A memory comes to me of your Egyptian roommate Mirna getting high and then talking to us animatedly at the table about how difficult it was for her to understand the holy trinity of Catholicism as a child. The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. She speaks French at breakneck speed and increasing volume using her hands, which are covered in rings. Her hair bounces and she hasn’t blinked in several minutes. “How can they be the same God?” she asks. “They are different beings. How do they split?”
I wonder how we can split ourselves again and again, too.
Like her, I have a mane of hair that moves when I talk. I shed like a dog, leaving long black curls on trains and in beds and on the cobblestones. I pull out loose strands at bars and discreetly leave them beneath the tables, sending a future apology to the person who will sweep later. When I was a child, I learned that our DNA is contained in each strand of hair, and I feared that someone would find the hair I dropped and clone some kind of malicious doppelgänger.
I have left a lot of versions of myself in strange and prodigious places, and I wish her well. I hope I will see her again.
