Читать книгу Promiscuous Unbound - Bex Brian - Страница 7

The French. When they are not flouncing around naked, they’re enraged with the government or terrified of British beef. At least, that’s what I’ve been able to glean from the TV, my Sonia-controlled peek at the outside world. I see nothing familiar, nothing that resembles the week I spent in Paris with Ralph just a couple of weeks ago before he left me for good. Paris then seemed like a sleepy, small town, which surprised me. It was early fall, after all, a time when people are usually filled with renewed vigor as they shake off summer doldrums and head back to school and work. But there was none of that. Ralph and I would walk the streets at a lazy stroll, and still we kept getting knotted up behind groups of kids whose kaleidoscopic patterns of shifting alliances made them impossible to pass. The cafes were full at all hours and in the parks, even though the trees had turned brown and each day seemed to grow increasingly windy, one saw couples ambling through, children playing, and lots of distinguished-looking gentleman walking dogs. The whole city seemed to be out of work, and didn’t give a damn about trying to conceal it.

But that certainly isn’t the Paris I’m seeing now on TV. Everyone is in an uproar, especially the farmers, who, as the night begins to fall, have had to abandon their unified chanting in order to try and prevent their city-panicked sheep from scattering down narrow streets and disapppearing into . . . what? A wild single life? I suppose the very pluralness of their name suggests that even the boldest among them doesn’t want to be without pals.

I wish I could actually hear the farmers’ ruckus in the Place de la Concorde. Smell the muddy-rich stink of the sheep, hear the clatter of their hooves echoing along the cobblestone streets. Considering the daily cavalcade of protesting malcontents—yesterday it was truckers clogging up the city with eighteen-wheelers, and the day before potato growers who thought it best to spill their harvest out onto the streets rather than sell them at ridiculously low government-set prices—I would have thought some of this turmoil would be dragged inside here by visitors. But as I hear the evening arrivals it’s all double kisses and tacit reassurances that nothing new is happening either at home or in the world.

What must the refugee be making of all this? Does she have any sympathy for these causes being so passionately aired? Maybe she identifies with the sheep. It must be so strange for her, riot without danger. The heated emotions, the demands, the threats all conducted in the proper safe cocoon of civilization.

Of course, she might be completely oblivious. She might not have seen any of these daily eruptions when she was out on the streets, choosing to avoid the huge thoroughfares and concourses, choosing to test her nerves instead on one of Paris’s countless quiet side streets, the very ones Ralph liked to steer me down, hating always the noise of traffic and the crush of people. Somehow the thought of that makes me sadder still. Her precarious balance of realities upset in the end by the immutable, sculpted gray silence of Paris.

Tides of refugees. Not a brushfire. Yes, that’s what the millions of refugees streaming out of Kosovo looked like on TV—a tide. It was hot and yet all the worry was over how the displaced were supposed to keep warm through the long Balkan winter, and against this backdrop of world crisis there was my own private despair. Ralph was leaving me. We were still in New York, in our apartment, the summer heat upon us. He turned on the TV while I packed for him. Nothing was being said. It was just another trip, another project. Fish this time. Illegally smuggled tropical fish. He needed to be based in Paris. That’s all, Paris being the best place to track the destination of millions of neon wonders illicitly scooped from Philippine waters. “Did you know,” he asked as the first few static pops of an image crackled on our ancient TV set, “that contrary to popular belief the favorite French pet is not the poodle but fish? “How strange,” I thought, looking at the piles of his freshly laundered clothes waiting to be packed, “fish. I’m allergic to fish.” Then the nightly news came on. The picture was faint, washed out by the strong late-slanting sunlight that flooded the living room. Ralph stood in front of the TV for a moment, then turned away.

“It looks like a fucking brushfire,” he said.

I stared at the sea-swell of humans and thought him crazy. All those dog-tired people collapsing at the side of the road the moment they were safely across the border looked like so much flotsam washed up on some craggy, shitty beach. Nothing you’d even want to pick through.

I started to cry. Just then a strikingly pretty young girl appeared on the screen, her face twisted with rage and confusion as she screamed at a news crew, “I am European too. Please, why is this happening to me?”

She turned away and the camera caught the eye of a toothless old crone who had been listening in. Her look of contempt and merciless glee was such that I thought she might chase down and box the ears of that girl, whose heartbreaking plea would become a rallying point, a symbol spurring on a generation to try and once and for all put a stop to the madness. Then, it was as if the old crone had been exorcised, never to be seen or heard from again. But I have often thought of her. There seemed to be a lesson in her toothless wizened face, a lesson I can only pad around the edges of, but I think it boils down to the fact that there is something both common and yet terrifyingly grand, and undeniable, about action beyond reason. Like my packing Ralph’s suitcase so that he could leave me.

“Its looks like a fucking brushfire.”

“What about me?” I wanted to scream. “Fish. You’re leaving me for fish.”

“Your tears won’t help that girl,” he said.