Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 22

OVER AT GARE ST.-LAZARE I BOUGHT AN AIR-INTER ticket one-way to Brest (not heeding Goulet’s advice) and cashed a travellers check of $50 (big deal) and went to my hotel room and spent two hours repacking so everything’d be alright and checking the rug on the floor for any lints I mighta left, and went down all dolled up (shaved etc.) and said goodbye to the evil woman and the nice man her husband who ran the hotel, with my hat on now, the rain hat I intended to wear on the midnight sea rocks, always wore it pulled down over the left eye I guess because that’s the way I wore my pea cap in the Navy—There were no great outcries of please come back but the desk clerk observed me as tho he was like to try me sometime.

Off we go in the cab to Orly airfield, in the rain again, 10 A.M. now, the cab zipping with beautiful speed out past all those signs advertising cognac and the surprising little stone country houses in between with French gardens of flowers and vegetables exquisitely kept, everything green as I imagine it must be in Auld England now.

(Like a nut I figured I could fly from Brest to London, only 150 miles as the crow flies.)

At Orly I check in my small but heavy suitcase at Air-Inter and then wander around till 12 noon boarding call. I drink cognac and beer in the really marvelous cafes they have in that air terminal, nothing so dismal as Idlewild Kennedy with its plush-carpet and cocktail-lounge Everybody-Quiet shot. For the second time I give a franc to the lady who sits in front of the toilets at a table, asking her: “Why do you sit there and why do people give you tips?”

“Because I clean the joint” which I understand right away and appreciate, thinking of my mother back home who has to clean the house while I yell insults at the T.V. from my rockingchair. So I say:

“Un franc pour la Française.”

I coulda said “The Inferno White Owl Sainte Theresia!” and she still wouldna cared. (Wouldn’t have cared, but I shorten things, after that great poet Robert Burns.)

So now it’s “Mathilda” I’m singing because the bell-tone announcing flights sings just like that song, in Orly, “Ma – Thil – Daa” and the quiet girlvoice: “Pan American Airlines Flight 603 to Karachi now loading at gate 32” or “K.L.M. Royal Dutch Airlines Flight 709 to Johannesburg now loading at gate 49” and so on, what an airport, people hear me singing “Mathilda” all over the place and I’ve already had a long talk about dogs with two Frenchmen and a dachsund in the cafe, and now I hear: “Air-Inter Flight 3 to Brest now loading at gate 96” and I start walking—down a long smooth corridor—

I walk about I swear a quartermile and come practically to the end of the terminal building and there’s Air-Inter, a two-engined old B-26 I guess with worried mechanics all fiddling around the propeller on the port side—

It’s flight time, noon, but I ask the people there “What’s wrong?”

“One hour delay.”

There’s no toilet here, no cafe, so I go back all the way to while away the hour in a cafe, and wait—

I go back at one.

“Half hour delay.”

I decide to sit it out, but suddenly I have to go to the toilet at 1:20—I ask a Spanish-looking Brest-bound passenger: “Think I got time to go to the toilet back at the terminal?”

“O sure, plenty time.”

I look, the mechanics out there are still worriedly fiddling, so I hurry that quartermile back, to the toilet, lay another franc for fun on La Française, and suddenly I hear “Ma – Thil – Daa” singsong with the word “Brest” so I like Clark Gable’s best fast walk hike on back almost as fast as a jogging trackman, if you know what I mean, but by the time I get there the plane is out taxiing to the runway, the ramp’s been rolled back which all those traitors just crept up, and off they go to Brittany with my suitcase.