Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: walked

14 September 2001: Silence, Lunch, and Picasso

Friday morning we ate breakfast in the hotel café, which meal was notable only for the numbers of Usans. I am not sure I heard any other accent or language. Of course, it can be heard to hear anything else than an American speaking.

That was one thing I read in Rick Steve's Paris (which another friend lent us) that was even vaguely critical of Usans--everything else was jocularly disdainful of the French, really helpful. Perhaps that was to put Usans at ease and relieve our feelings of inferiority. The one thing was a gentle hint to lower your volume, to take your cue from Europeans who in general don't shriek at one another across a table.

Nisou had called us Tuesday morning and we had made plans then to meet at our first hotel at 11:00, have lunch, and go to the Picasso Museum. We packed our bags and arranged for the desk to keep them for the day. In the aprés-midi we would change to the free hotel. Nisou et SPG showed up perfectly on time. I thought we could do both the Cluny and the Picasso Friday, but they had already seen the former and Nisou had learned of a moment of silence at the U.S. embassy at noon.

We walked from the Cayré at the top of Boulevard Raspail at St. Germain Boulevard across le pont de la Concorde. Nisou suggested we turn around right about now and we did: the closest we would get to the Eiffel Tower. We browsed a little bit at an English language bookstore (I need to find The Justification of Johann Gutenberg by Blake Morrison), followed Nisou to the wrong entrance of the embassy--the one she knew, where you renew your passport--were directed to the Place de la Concorde (a much larger space, where people used to lose their heads), with lots and lots of people.

RDC and I stood by this tree this one right here because all four of us couldn't've stayed together as Nisou wove through the crowd to the front to lay her flowers. At noon, bells rang and then silence descended. Traffic didn't stop but was less with fewer horns and public transportation came to a standstill. I was part of a somber silence. A few people had U.S. flags, others had both French and U.S. flags together. I could just see guards saluting at the front of the crowd honoring what I could not see. Some people bowed their heads. It was very still.

Later we were to learn that at Notre Dame, something more organized had happened. Here, the emotion everyone--tourists, expats, French and other non-U.S. citizens--felt was almost tangible, the grief and shock and community, but as it was only a moment of silence, everyone dispersed without a public outpouring of emotion.

This was one of the occasions being away was both good and bad. Good not to be surrounded by everything--as surrounded as we would have been in Denver--and bad not to be surrounded by it, suffering the same 18 minutes of "what a terrible accident" before seeing the second plane, knowing this was no accident, but deliberate, an attack, experiencing the same panic and rumors and fear of the next several hours.

I was really impressed that Nisou found Tom in the crush--a friend from later UConn who had come with a coworker, Mary Lou. I was further impressed when Nisou found the restaurant she had in mind. The six of us settled in for a long leisurely lunch, a much better and more Parisian idea than mine, which was to pick up a bite on the way and Get Stuff Done. Mary Lou introduced Tom to his girlfriend Édith and he had been telling Nisou & SPG about her for years but this was the first time they met. She was très charmant and I was pleased to get to sit next to her. I don't think Tom remembered me at all, but I remember a dinner Nisou had made for Adama, who was I think Senegalese. He missed millet, the staple grain there as wheat is here, and Nisou made a lamb stew over steamed millet. I was looking forward to the millet, since I wanted to know what Percy made such a fuss over, and this was when the only meat I ate was Charenton lamb. We--Nisou, her parents, Adama, Babakar, TJZ, Tom, and I--ate sitting on the floor around Charenton's long narrow coffee table in front of the fire. That was a wonderful evening; I have a picture of it--without Tom, who took it--in one of my collages.

Looking up at that photograph now, I see that Karen was there too. When Tom was impressed that I remembered the evening, Nisou told him what a fantastic memory I have. I am, in general, Poppin' Fresh Memory, but I left Karen out. Which in itself is kind of funny, because for years Nisou couldn't remember whether we had met and would always introduce us to each other. Ooops.

Mary Lou lived in Minneapolis for five years and her English was great. She was actually Mexican so spoke three languages. So did everyone else that weekend. I have to get her address. She was super and I was glad I had chilled about Not Crossing Stuff Off My List. To my knowledge (and I checked with RDC), none of my frustrated fretfulness showed. Good, because I was wrong.

I would discover once home that I lost my pictures from this day. I must have deleted my chip without emptying its contents to the digital wallet. I guess I didn't have anything vital. I kicked myself when we left the café because I had remembered then forgot to ask the waiter to take a picture of the six of us. For that picture to have been deleted would be worse than just not taking it at all, or so I justified it.

When we peeled ourselves away from the table, Tom and Mary Lou returned to work and the four of us walked toward the Musée Picasso. I'm not sure Nisou was thrilled with the prospect of walking the whole distance, but if I wasn't going to see the Cluny I did want to see the city. Near the embassy, we saw a store, La Vie en Rose, with a sign in its window:

To our U.S. friends
We are extremely shocked by the tragic events and we would like to express our sympathy and compassion. We have at your disposal phone, fax, and email to get in touch with your family, friends at home. We speak English.

Also there was a notice that they would be closed during the minutes of silence. People really are kind. And I'm pretty sure this is not the only such sign we saw. We bypassed the lines at the Louvre and the Pompidou and let ourselves be drawn into E. Dehillerin Matériel de Cuisine. This is JUMB's favorite shop and a must-do every time she's in Paris. I think we were looking for a chestnut knife. RDC fell in love with the copper pots.

The Picasso was super, but my losing my pictures means that I have only those images that struck RDC instead of the ones that struck me. These two sets had some but not a lot of overlap, and the museum doesn't have a website--nonflash photography woud be allowed in every museum we visited in France. These are the images I lost:

• Tête de femme
• Seated nude
• Mère en enfant (beg. cubist)
• L'Arbre
• Le Sacré Cœur (aha, RDC has this one!)
• Homme à la mandolin (RDC)
• Olga Pensive (this one I really liked and sketched the angles and outlines of, badly, but to remind myself and because you do remember a thing better when you've drawn it, just as you remember words better writing them. Maybe it's just me.)
• The Acrobat (RDC)
• Tête d'une femme
• Nu au bouquet d'iris au miroir
• Grand nature mort au guéridon
• Portrait d'une jeune femme
• Grand baigneuse au livre (RDC)
• La Chevre (this was a way cool goat sculpture. It looked like the goats in the puppet show of "Sound of Music." What's not to love? Yea! RDC has this one too.)
• Femme assise

I'm pretty sure this was early Picasso under Cézanne's influence. Picasso also owned a few Cézannes, and this could be one of those. But I think this is Picasso au Cézanne. I love those Cézanne landscapes anyway.

Whereas this one, L'Homme au Mandolin, reminds me of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which we saw long ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Picasso painted the movement of the playing as well as the man and the mandolin, which is actually distinctly mandolin-like at the middle of the right border.

It's a representation of what is known about the object as well as all the surfaces and volumes of the object. For this one I asked Nisou why you would say "l'homme au mandolin" instead of "avec un mandolin." She said you would say "with" for man with a woman, but a man with accroutements would be at them. Oh. I can memorize a principle.

L'acrobat and Les Baigneuses, I think.

I don't know if this is Reading or Grande Baigneuse au livre, but I liked this one. This is the painting I referred to when describing to Nisou how lavender the walls of my bedroom aren't.

Sproing.

This goat is a dead ringer for the one from "The Sound of Music." Really, it is.

I wasn't sure if Nisou et SPG would want to stay as long as RDC would like to--he was in his element--but they did, so we left together and scampered toward the Seine. Nisou pegged me for saying "scamper." We found some intriguing shops and I hope I still have their cards, though I can't think now where they'd be, and then stopped at an outdoor café for a drink.

The museum used to be Picasso's house and was ceded to the government in lieu of estate taxes. The house surrounds a courtyard with an arched gateway to the street. After the attacks, British prime minister Blair forbad flight paths over central London. I don't know when that ban was lifted: sometime after we left. I don't know if Chirac imposed similar restrictions for Paris. What I do know is that as we left the museum, stepped into the street from the courtyard, the same thing caught all four pairs of eyes: a plane, sharply white against the blue sky, and not only was it a plane, but because of the angle and the arch, the illusion was that of a plane--though a very small, dragonfly-sized plane--about the strike the building. We each looked at everyone else, saw that we'd each seen the same thing, and met each other's eyes again with shaky smiles.

Here's something I learned: "lemonade" isn't lemonade Over There. It's Sprite or 7-Up or something. It's the lemon equivalent of orangeade, which is Not Orange Juice Either. So I stuck to ginger ale. Besides the lack of proper lemon squash, I had another reason to appreciate home custom: in U.S. cities, we clean up after our dogs. That's all I want to say about that. SPG reached for my wrist to see the time. It was 5:25 and so the hands were aligned so much that SPG thought my watch had only one for some superhero reason. No, I said, the minute hand is just covering the hour hand, and stretched out my arms over one another. He was flabbergasted. Not because French watches don't do such a thing, but because he never knew that the doohickeys in watches and clocks are hands. The man's English is wonderful--he knew "threshold"--but somehow had never heard this metaphor. I asked what you call them in French. He said a word I remembered for the rest of the conversation, though no longer: needle. That makes sense, I said, we call the pointer in a compass a needle. All these little bits of language.

We walked down la rue Vielle du Temple à la rue de Rivoli, passed a tiny--relatively--cathedral, St. Gervais, found the Hotel de Ville where they would meet Tom (with whom they were crashing), and from a street vendor bought crêpes. Mine was filled with chocolat noir, RDC's with Nutella, SPG's with peanut butter (he's been Usanized in all the best ways), and Nisou's with lemon and sugar. I decided I was hard done by because I, having ordered first, finished mine just after Nisou's, ordered last, came off the crackling hot griddle. Nisou in her infinite mercy gave me a bite of hers.

This is apparently the Paris equivalent of a NYC pretzel. Vastly superior, of course, because freshly cooked to order and particularly because it has chocolate. Not that I want to denigrate salt as a food group. I could drink soy sauce.

More charity from Nisou: she briefed our cabbie on what had to happen: bring us to the Cayré for our bags and on to the Prince de Galles, our swank freebie. He sped us thither and yon and so we arrived, not a block from the Avenue Champs Elysées. Verdict: nice, because free, absolutely never worth the actual price because it was all location location location--not only close to the Avenue but next to a Four Seasons. Ooo. Also close to shopping, Elysian and otherwise. Yawn.

We strolled out to l'Avenue Champs Elysées, saw l'Arc de Triomphe in one direction and France's equivalent of London's Millennium Eye in the other--I never was clear what this Ferris wheel's name was--and found le Bouchon Gourmand. We had escargots en crouet et canard (moi) et pâté du canard et scorpion fish (lui). (Hmm, I think pâté figured in Thursday's dinner as well. Mmm, as did a yummy chocolate pastry pie sort of thing.)

The layout of this little restaurant appealed to me hugely. A regular staircase at the back in an unused dining area--maybe tourism had already dropped off, from the season first and from the attacks next--led upstairs to a WC--a real toilet in this place. Whew. Also upstairs, through an office, at the front of the building, was the kitchen. Another staircase, an extremely steep spiral, rose from the bar in the front, and also a dumbwaiter got the food from the cuisine to the salle. The sole woman who seated, took orders, made drinks, and did all the floor work, would occasionally shout up the stairs to whoever was in the kitchen. We debated whether there were only two people running the whole place.

Dessert was good here, too, if not as good because misleadingly named: mandarin au chocolat. Not chocolate-slathered citrus but orange-flavored custard covered with dark chocolate in a bed of liquid custard spun with framboise. It didn't suck.

Then we heeded the call of our bed.