Three True Stories about Music in Paris

Arriving in France on the redeye from Newark was pretty easy. You just woke up when the wheels hit the tarmac and groggily gathered your things and sleepwalked up the jetway. The hard part was that the passport control stations were closed. A whole plane’s worth of people let out a collective groan, and then we proceeded to wait. After a half hour some uniformed officers walked over and sat down in the empty booths, fired up the computers, changed the dates on their stamps, and casually waved the first travelers up. It was as if they hadn’t seen the crowd gathered there, propped up on the telescoping handles of their wheelie bags.

The next step was to buy a ticket for the RER line B, a commuter train that runs to Paris. This could be done right there in Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, at a touch screen machine. A lot of people had caught on to the convenience, so there was a substantial line. I waited. When I got to the machine everything failed in order like dominoes: all the credit cards don’t work, oh there is no bill acceptor, oh I don’t have any coins, etc. All the people behind me were breathing right down my neck. It was a step-out-and-regroup moment. I shuffled to the back of the line and this time watched over others’ shoulders while they nimbly navigated the series of screens. The next time things went better.

Down on the platform, the train glided up like it was on silk wheels. Just a gentle whoosh and a pleasant *ding* and the doors opened and I was on. Seconds after we pulled away from the station there was a hollow sucking sound, the door at the end of the car opened, and in walked a man brandishing an accordion and wearing a black beret and tight blue jeans. As far as I could see, this was not a joke: he seemed serious about the whole ensemble. He scanned the car for just a second, then launched into a very fine rendition of “Besame Mucho”. Ambling slowly and nonchalantly up the aisle of the car, he was looking out the windows, seeming to play not just for us passengers but also for the gray warehouses and the graffiti’d walls sliding by. He came to the door at the other end just as the song finished. Taking his hand off the keyboard, he opened the door and stepped out. He hadn’t given anyone a chance to pay him.

*

On Monday night, June 8, a group of us were walking around Paris in the dark. We crossed over from the Quartier Latin to the Ile de la Cite and we looked up at the towering hulk of Notre Dame. Standing very close to the wrought iron fence in front, inspecting the intricate carving over the portals, all at once and without warning there was a great and frightening sound from inside. It was an organ. It was the organ. Someone was inside the cathedral after hours playing that massive thing, and here it was, emanating like a rumble from the stomach of the great gray church. In my imagination I saw the player sitting at the stacked manuals, surrounded by scores of stops, the bass keyboard underfoot, and the only light on in that huge vaulted stone place would have been the little cylindrical brass light mounted atop the cabinet. You know, the one with the black plastic knob on the end that you turn between your thumb and forefinger.

*

Just minutes later we were crossing back over from the Ile de la Cite to the bank from which we had come, and we heard accordion music again. This time it was not the strange speaking of some inanimate object, or of the city itself. As we came closer we saw it was another bereted accordion player. He had been hidden from the lamplight by the shade of a leafy tree at the near end of the bridge. And there was an old couple, a gray-haired man wearing a dark suit and a tie, and a woman in a long skirt and a jacket, dancing cheek-to-cheek near the rail overlooking the water. It was nothing structured like a waltz or anything else; just a tender procession of soft, turning steps, the two together in planetary motion across the gentle arc of the bridge.

Egads, how the time passes. Two weeks in far-flung corners of the world, and no blogs to show for it. I have half-finished posts from Paris and from Busia, Kenya. (They're coming...) But this one was...urgent.

Yesterday I left the IPA Malawi office in around 3pm because I was delirious and falling asleep in my chair. I hadn't slept in 34 hours due to the outrageous timetables that define international travel within Africa, and so I was aiming for the hotel bed, for a nap before dinner. In the end I didn't get any sleep because of what I saw on the minibus (a larger version of a Ghanaian trotro). It kept playing through my head and chasing away the sandman. So I chased it away by writing it down:

The oldest woman in the world rides the minibus from Old Town, Lilongwe to Likuni, sitting in the back row. She wears a yellow print cloth wrapped around her waist for a skirt, and a red hand-sewn blouse with puffy yellow shoulders. Out of its short sleeves emerge the oldest arms in the world, skinny bones leading to jagged wrists, spanned by ropy veins like the woody vines of an ancient jungle, and paper-thin leather stretched over it all like the skin on a cup of instant coffee left out since last night.

The oldest woman in the world has a piece of plain green cloth around her waist for a belt. In its cinched knot hide a number of old, dark coins. More are hiding in the twists of a triangular brown cloth shawl whose corners are tied in front of her chest. Her head is wrapped in a red cloth. All I can see is a few small yellow-gray bushes of wiry hair at her temples. There are bits of charcoal and sand in the hollows of her ears.

She has exactly no teeth. Her voice is the breaking of dry twigs, the hot, dry air of the oven, and the creaking of an old wooden door, or a rusty pile of scrap metal ribbons.

The oldest hands in the world are bigger than you might think. They used to be reptilian, but their shiny, scaly skin and their claws are dull now from 48,000 years of kneading sharp gravel. They are gnarled from being twisted in the spokes of an ancient wagon wheel. The left thumb-nail is like the blade of a shovel: squared off, pitted and embossed with dirt, the edge bent under.

There is a walking-stick, both ends of it bashed out soft and flat like the head of a railroad stake that has known the nine pound sledge. Its length is knobby and worn smooth as driftwood.

I would like to tell you about the face of the oldest woman in the world, but in truth I barely got to see it. From the moment I sat down beside her until the moment I got up to leave, she was turned away from me, making faces at a baby girl perched on its mother’s lap in the next seat.

The tiny nowhere town of Uyuni has two claims to fame: fantastic freshly-made pizza, and the world’s largest salt flats. It had been pointed out to me that, although it is at least eleven hours away, La Paz is the closest major city in the sense that it takes longer to get to Uyuni from anywhere else. Clearly, this was a golden opportunity.

I left La Paz Friday morning at 10 on a bus bound for Oruro, a smallish city at about the halfway mark. From there I would take the train. The bus was scheduled to stop at the Oruro train station, so the connection should have been easy. But ultimately it was not.

On the bus a woman sat down next to me and struck up conversation, kindly accommodating my horrific Spanish. In a slow, halting way we found out about each other. She is a book distributor dealing mostly in textbooks and technical literature. She sells to retail bookstores in La Paz, and also directly to schools and universities. She was on her way to Oruro to catch the train to Buenos Aires, site of a big international book fair during the coming week. She had friends with her, too—other book distributors from La Paz also headed to the book fair. In fact, theirs was the same train as mine. It continues south from Uyuni, over the Argentine border, and on to the capital.

We talked until the movie came on; after that we couldn’t. I can always count on being seated directly under a speaker. If possible, mine will be the broken, rattling and buzzing and hissing one. This has been true since Ghana and was true again on Friday. The real issue is the combination of excessive volume and poor-quality soundtracks of local movies. In this story, the main character had recurring visions, abruptly cut to, of a roaring tiger and of a deafening drum circle. It was unpleasant.

I put in my headphones and fell asleep. Sometime during the ride I was nudged awake by my neighbor, who told me something about Oruro. My Spanish was even poorer in that confused state; I really only heard the words for “problem”, “blockade”, and “train”. But I was awake enough to know I my options weren’t very good. They were: (1) Ask the bus driver to stop and let me out in the altiplano, that vast plateau of grassland full of nothing but thin air, brutal sun, and a driving prairie wind, where I could try to make alternate travel arrangements myself; or (2) Wait and see. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up we were closer to Oruro, and all the chatter on the bus was about the bloqueo. My neighbor told me more about it. Apparently the city’s residents were unhappy about a fare hike by the combi drivers. (A combi is a just like a Ghanaian trotro: a van whose insides have been gutted and replaced with bench seats to accommodate 13 passengers. It is used for public transportation.) Some routes which used to cost Bs. 1 ($0.15) now cost Bs. 1.50 ($0.22). While not a huge jump in absolute terms, the percentage increase was reason enough to drag out a bunch of sizeable rocks and break glass bottles. These hazards were organized into neat lines across all the main roads in the city, and made it impossible for vehicles to pass.

So eventually our bus came to a stop behind other buses and trucks, on a ring road that ran to the east of the city center. Beyond the bloqueo kids were playing soccer on the empty asphalt, and vendors selling ice cream and bread rolls pushed their carts, calling out to them and to the adults who leaned against the cement barrier in the middle of the road. Except for the kids, everyone looked bored. We were about four miles from the train station, and had a little less than an hour before departure.

My neighbor told me to come with her group—they had a plan, she said—and we stepped over the stones and the glass and began walking south. The women split off on a side street and I continued with the men. One of them was on his phone, furiously smoking cigarettes. He looked around in all directions. Just beyond the next bloqueo, about 300m down the road, a white pickup truck pulled up. The man with the phone raised his arms in triumph. We walked to the truck, got in, and took a winding tour of Oruro’s back roads, avoiding the rocks and broken glass and indifferent protesters. We were at the train station inside of ten minutes.

I thanked them as profusely as I could with my limited vocabulary, and they in turn insisted on buying me lunch. How about that?

It's been a while. I will not claim there was nothing to write about--of course, something interesting is happening everywhere and at all times. Too often I just don't have the eyes to see it. Thankfully, India is abrasive, even corrosive. It rubs those cataracts right off.

Even at two weeks' remove, some of the visions still feel miraculously fresh. Below are three. Sorry they're late.

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1. Nirmal's Math

During our first conversation, while I was seated on a tiny stool in his shop, Nirmal said, "For me, I have a saying: 'Come as visitor, go as friend.'" This, it turned out, was no empty threat. I can say so confidently because the very next day he risked life and limb taking me to the train station on his scooter. We were weaving in and out of a wedding procession, around palanquins and around people dressed in incredible sequined saris and around a wooden cart loaded with huge blaring speakers and around an elephant. Actually, we were heading towards my hotel--and away from the train station--as we lurched out from behind the elephant, but that's only because we had to get my big, unwieldy suitcase and try to wedge it onto the scooter with us.

He parked his scooter and we rushed across a footbridge to Hanuman Gat, the neighborhood where my hotel was. We were hustling around couples and groups out for eveningtime strolls. Many were stopped, leaning on the rail of the bridge, looking south onto the lake and the fairytale palace that seemed to float in its center. The palace was all white and lit with white lights. It looked like a huge, organized assembly of candles out there on the dark lake.

Nirmal said, "You know, we get a lot of Indian tourists here in Udaipur."

"It looks that way. What percentage of all tourists to Udaipur are Indian, do you think?"

"Oh, at least sixty to seventy percent."

"Wow," I said. "So most of the tourists in the city are actually Indian?"

"No. It's about equal."

"Oh, so half-half? I thought you said at least sixty percent were Indian."

"Yes. Half-half. Sixty percent Indian, sixty percent foreign. It is like that."

*

2. Two scenes glimpsed out the side of an auto-rickshaw in Calcutta. Each lasted less than 30 seconds.

First, a little boy not more than 5 years old. He was filthy, wearing filthy pants and a filthy shirt, and his cheeks and forehead were marked with little circles of soot or ash, as if he had been stamped by a filthy stamp. He was doing awkward and jerky somersaults on the sidewalk and in the side of the street. Not fully in control of his limbs, he moved like a rag doll. A woman, presumably his mother, sat to one side playing a tin drum with a wooden mallet. She was smiling. After his fourth somersault he sat with his legs splayed out and the woman handed him a metal ring about 16" in diameter. He pulled himself through it, sitting doubled over with legs outstretched, cinching it around himself perfunctorily, working it over the sad little hump of his shoulders. The ring, free of him, clattered to the ground and the woman banged twice on the tin drum to mark the end of the show. The boy walked around to the cars and rickshaws stopped at the intersection, braying feebly at the drivers. He made his loop and walked back towards the sidewalk. In his filthy, sweaty, sooty little right hand he clutched the shiny rupees my auto driver gave him.

Second, at night, close to the Shobhabazaar metro stop in an auto-rickshaw bound for Ultadanga. The road is impossibly crowded. Dingy orange-yellow light from incandescent bulbs and coffee-can oil lamps spills over vendors, pedestrians. It smells like burning ghee; it smells like cigarettes. On my teeth I can feel the grit from diesel exhaust, from burning gas and plastic. The driver spits a vile missile of dark red juice out onto the street. His left cheek is stuffed with pan (a mix of betelnut, tobacco, sugar, fruit syrup, candied dried fruit, anise seed, dried coconut, other nameless pastes and powders, all rolled in a green leaf into a cone-shaped pouch the size of a golf ball). Looking up to the sidewalk, there they are BOOM! two perfectly white cats in a wire cage perched on a high stool. People stream by the cage carrying briefcases, carrying plastic bags with sticky, dirty hands, bearing in their cheeks huge wads of pan. Yet here are the cats, perfectly white, impossibly white, actually, given the dingy orange-yellow light of the street, but undeniably there and undeniably as white as they seem. They were cute, too, their fur attractively matted and tousled. One playfully batted the other with its paw, gentle as a lamb.

*

3. Some types of houses seen on Feb 17th, around 5:00pm, from the window of a Sleeper Class car on the overnight train from Chennai to Hyderabad.

• Houses made all of dried palm fronds woven together
• Houses made all of odds and ends of corrugated aluminum
• Houses made with walls of corrugated aluminum & peaked roofs of dried up interwoven palm fronds
• Houses with walls of dried up interwoven palm fronds & one-way slanting roofs of cardboard and plastic sheeting and corrugated aluminum
• Houses in the mud
• Houses that are just cloth sheets held up by 4 or 6 wooden poles
• Houses of cloth and poles fallen over like a horse
• Houses caved in like rotten tomatoes
• Houses all deflated like an old pumpkin
• Some brick houses