Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 23

NOW I’M SUPPOSED TO GO DABBLING ALL OVER France with clean fingernails and a joyous tourist expression.

“Calvert!” I blaspheme at the desk (for which I’m sorry, Oh Lord). “I’m going to follow them in a train! Can you sell me a train ticket? They took off with my valise!”

“You’ll have to go to Gare Montparnasse for that but I’m really sorry, Monsieur, but that is the most ridiculous way to miss a plane.”

I say to myself “Yeah, you cheapskates, why dont you build a toilet.”

But I go in a taxi 15 miles back to Gare Montparnasse and I buy a one-way ticket to Brest, first class, and as I think about my suitcase, and what Goulet said, I also remember now the pirates of St. Malo not to mention the pirates of Penzance.

Who cares? I’ll catch up with the rats.

I get on the train among thousands of people, turns out there’s a holiday in Brittany and everybody’s going home.

There are those compartments where firstclass ticketed people can sit, and those narrow window alleys where secondclass ticketed people stand leaning at the windows and watch the land roll by—I pass the first compartment of the coach I picked and see nothing but women and babies—I know instinctively I’ll choose the second compartment—And I do! Because what do I see in there but “Le Rouge et le Noire” (The Red and the Black), that is to say, the Military and the Church, a French soldier and a Catholic priest, and not only that but two pleasant looking old ladies and a weird looking drunklooking guy in the corner, that makes five, leaving the sixth and last place for me, “Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac” as I presently announce, knowing I’m home and they’ll understand my family picked up some weird manners in Canada and the U.S.A.— (which I announce of course only after I’ve asked “Je peu m’assoir?” (I can sit?), “Yes,” and I excuse myself across the ladies’ legs and plump right down next to the priest, removed my hat already, and address him: “Bonjour, mon Père.”

Now this is the real way to go to Brittany, gents.