<3 Pa / Ma
Ja, Pa. Full-on or fuck-all.
Paris. The city of love. Hemingway’s “moveable feast”. “Paris is always a good idea,” as Audrey Hepburn said. It was this city whose street life Jan Rabie described as “a history book of the whole world” in his diary. And the place about which André P. Brink wrote: “I was ‘born’ on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris – when I was 23 years old.”
After all the running around and battling with my luggage at Charles de Gaulle, I sit on a bench to catch my breath. There are heavily armed policemen everywhere, vigilant and intimidating and not missing a thing about their surroundings. The Charlie Hebdo attack was just four months ago. For the first time since leaving Cape Town, I feel truly alone. And I realise: I am completely dependent upon myself for the next forty days.
At the Saint-Michel station I totter up the stairs with my heavy rucksack to see the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris (French for “Our Lady of Paris”) looming ahead of me. I’ve always got excited about monuments, iconic buildings, even natural phenomena. I remember the first time I saw Table Mountain as a four-year-old through the car window in 1983. One of my uncles was an NP MP for Uitenhage and my parents and I stayed with him in Acacia Park. More than two decades later I stood in absolute amazement in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra and felt that childlike Table Mountain feeling again.
It felt the same to see Notre Dame, a cathedral I first got to know in a Disney movie about a gypsy, who was attractive even for an animated character, talking gargoyles and a kind-hearted hunchback.
This is my second visit to Paris. In September 2012 my father and I flew in to Charles de Gaulle and had less than four hours before catching a connecting flight to Verona in Italy. Rather than idling away a few empty hours somewhere in a restaurant at the airport, my father wanted to take a quick dash around Paris. The woman at the information counter strongly advised against taking the train into the city – she thought we wouldn’t make it back in time for the connecting flight. We decided to take a train to Saint-Michel anyway. Near Notre Dame we enjoyed a glass of French champagne and some rabbit pâté.
The masses of tourists in front of Notre Dame on that beautiful autumn afternoon three years ago are not here tonight – there is just a cluster here and there, most with their backs to the cathedral taking selfies.
I stroll over the Pont des Arts, one of the city’s famous bridges. Lovers attach so-called love locks to the bridge, often with their names written on them, then throw the key into the Seine. This tradition may only have started in 2008, but there are already hundreds – if not thousands – of locks of all sizes and colours all along the railings of the bridge. It’s a tradition that has caused concern, as bridges have been damaged as a result. It’s feared that the weight of all that love – or rather, the valiant declaration of it – could cause some of them to collapse.
I read some of the names on the locks: Jackie and Benn (17-05-12 Wedding), Eddy and Delia, Michael and Candice, one has only Rubí … Six months ago there was a name on my lips, too, one I would have liked to write on a lock next to my own and fasten it to this bridge.
* * *
I walk for about half an hour to the Gare d’Austerlitz, the station where the overnight train to Bayonne in the southwest of France awaits me.
Laurika Rauch sings about Austerlitz in her song “Hot Gates”, a moving ballad listing historical battlefields and places of conflict. The station in Paris is named after a major battle fought on 2 December 1805 near the little town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire – one of Napoleon’s most renowned victories.
The lack of sleep is beginning to catch up with me. At a busy intersection I look right as usual before crossing, and just don’t see the motorbike coming from the left. We miss each other by what feels like centimetres … it happens too quickly for me to grasp how close it was. I freeze, then I realise how it happened: I crossed the street as if I were in South Africa. First look right, then left, then right again, as Daantjie Kat taught me on the record player way back in the early eighties – so I just didn’t see the motorbike bearing down on me.
I suppose I could put it down to the shitstorm I’ve been through. Or to exhaustion. Or both. But even an hour later, having a pizza and a beer, I’m still rattled. I could have been killed, or at least seriously injured. My Camino could have ended in Paris before it had even begun. The difference between a sigh of relief and a hell of a drama was literally a fraction of a second. Why did nothing happen to me? Luck? Grace?
“There is no way to know what makes one thing happen, and not another.”
* * *
At nine o’clock I step onto the overnight train. Bayonne is many hours away. My thinking was that I could just as easily sleep on the train as look up a cheap hotel in Bayonne.
Ahead of me in the queue there’s a girl with a ponytail and a green rucksack with something embroidered on it that looks like a flag or an emblem – a cluster of colourful blocks arranged diagonally. Could she be the first of my fellow walkers? I kind of hope we’re in the same compartment.
The compartment is tiny, three bunks stacked on top of one another on each side. The woman with the rucksack is not in my compartment after all; Tom, a tanned young French surfer who lives near Bayonne, is. He’s on his way home after a few months’ surfing in Australia. While we’re chatting, a middle-aged Frenchwoman and two Belgian girls also come in. The Belgians are on holiday in France; the Frenchwoman doesn’t talk much. None of them is heading for the Camino. The Belgians are astounded to hear that I’m tackling it alone.
The train slowly pulls out of the Gare d’Austerlitz, creaking and groaning. It’s so cramped that all we can do is lie like sardines in our bunks. The small talk stops. I go to brush my teeth. Standing in front of the mirror, I consider using the sleep apnoea plasters. No, I’ll be too self-conscious – the others will just have to endure my snoring.
When I get back to the compartment, the lights are already off. I might as well have used the Provent plasters.
* * *
Train journeys always take me back to Uitenhage, where I grew up. I often say that Uitenhage is the most beautiful song Bruce Springsteen will never write. The Boss would feel at home there, especially near Volkswagen, the area’s blue-collar mecca.
Sometimes, my father would take me to the nearby Willow Dam on Sundays, where we would ride three laps of the circular 300-metre track on a small steam engine, Little Bess.
My first trip on the Trans-Karoo, known these days as the Shosholoza Meyl, was in 2002 during my Honours year in journalism at Stellenbosch. Our annual class excursion that year was to Gauteng and we were able to persuade the lecturers to let us travel by train rather than by bus.
I was 22, full of plans and dreams and things. I remember the plastic bag with the five bottles that Gerjo, Borrie and I unpacked onto the little table in the compartment: Old Brown Sherry, Tassenberg, Smirnoff vodka, Bell’s whisky and VO brandy. Sometime during the night, as the train rolled past Makwassie, a joint also did the rounds.
* * *
Despite having had so little sleep for two days, I keep waking up in my bunk. So much for the soothing sound of wheels on rails – instead, there’s jangling and clattering. Sometimes it even feels like the coaches are being shaken from side to side.
At eight in the morning the train pulls into the station in Bayonne, almost 800 kilometres southwest of Paris. It feels good
