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.