Walk It Off. Erns Grundling
* *
Entry in Moleskine diary
Maybe it’s like a train riding into rain, Gertjie. I’m somehow thinking of you now in the train between Charles de Gaulle and Saint-Michel–Notre-Dame. It’s almost three years since my father and I were on a similar train not riding into rain but riding into the most autumnal autumn that I can remember and there are so few. Around me people are on their phones or reading books there are umbrellas and accents, I constantly feel I’m hearing Afrikaans but I’m mistaken the robot voice (woman’s voice) of the train has just pronounced Parc des Expositions I just hear “Sex positions” my first impressions of Europeans are probably wrong but I detect a sophisticated indifference, almost as if ubuntu will never fly here – not that ubuntu flies in Africa anyway. At the airport Gert a quick young Frenchman started coming down on me in front of a whole lot of people in an ever-lengthening, stressful queue of Doha-Paris-bound passengers for deliberately brushing up against a woman, according to him, as if I wanted to dry-hump her in a split second like dolphins that have sex in a flash, but his outburst caught me off guard and I couldn’t find the words “I didn’t bump into her on purpose” and went into a whole long explanation of the trains I was chasing instead and said I was just in a rush and not looking where I was going and he just shook his head like the Head Boy of Life and said “Blablablabla” and spoke to the girl and her boyfriend in French and he almost became involved and people started staring and my only comeback was “You should come to Africa” but God knows why I defaulted to that maybe I just wanted to make a point about personal space in Africa or rather the lack of it and that he would have a lot to say in a queue at Home Affairs but there was no time to say everything but at that moment I became hyperaware of a type of pretentiousness and profoundly First World luxury and decorum. Anyway, Gert, God only knows why I’m not reading or doing crosswords rather I’m buggered Gert dead tired from sleep apnoea and fuck-all sleep. It’s dismal in Paris. Hitting pause for a bit.
* * *
I feel a deep ambivalence towards the two Moleskine diaries I packed for the Camino.
I could easily have arranged in advance to write a freelance story or three to help cover expenses. And there’s nothing stopping me from writing a column or a feature article for Go on my Camino experiences when I get back to Cape Town. I could even consider writing a book or a guide. But I just don’t want to. Everything in me is fighting the thought. I’m just completely written out.
In “Famous Blue Raincoat” Leonard Cohen sings: “You’re living for nothing now / I hope you’re keeping some kind of record”. I like the idea of “some kind of record”, even if it’s for me alone. And who knows? Maybe an idea or two finds me halfway along the Camino, in which case I’ll definitely need pen and paper. Maybe I’ll write a bit of poetry again. Or a song, for the first time in ten years. What happens to us when we detach ourselves from all the distractions, especially the cell phone screens that keep us so busy?
* * *
SMS to my father, Monday 4 May, 19:38 p.m.
Guess where I’m standing right now? At Notre Dame! Going to Bayonne just now, then mailing my laptop and cell phone to a journalist in Paris. I’ll fetch them again on 15 June. Got all my work done, holiday starts NOW. Much love.
His reply:
Bon Voyage! Go well on the walk and so happy you are going to enjoy it to the full! Will miss you. Look after yourself! <3 Pa / Ma
Ja, Pa. Full-on or fuck-all.
Paris. The city of love. Hemingway’s “moveable feast”. “Paris is always a good idea,” as Audrey Hepburn said. It was this city whose street life Jan Rabie described as “a history book of the whole world” in his diary. And the place about which André P. Brink wrote: “I was ‘born’ on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris – when I was 23 years old.”
After all the running around and battling with my luggage at Charles de Gaulle, I sit on a bench to catch my breath. There are heavily armed policemen everywhere, vigilant and intimidating and not missing a thing about their surroundings. The Charlie Hebdo attack was just four months ago. For the first time since leaving Cape Town, I feel truly alone. And I realise: I am completely dependent upon myself for the next forty days.
At the Saint-Michel station I totter up the stairs with my heavy rucksack to see the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris (French for “Our Lady of Paris”) looming ahead of me. I’ve always got excited about monuments, iconic buildings, even natural phenomena. I remember the first time I saw Table Mountain as a four-year-old through the car window in 1983. One of my uncles was an NP MP for Uitenhage and my parents and I stayed with him in Acacia Park. More than two decades later I stood in absolute amazement in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra and felt that childlike Table Mountain feeling again.
It felt the same to see Notre Dame, a cathedral I first got to know in a Disney movie about a gypsy, who was attractive even for an animated character, talking gargoyles and a kind-hearted hunchback.
This is my second visit to Paris. In September 2012 my father and I flew in to Charles de Gaulle and had less than four hours before catching a connecting flight to Verona in Italy. Rather than idling away a few empty hours somewhere in a restaurant at the airport, my father wanted to take a quick dash around Paris. The woman at the information counter strongly advised against taking the train into the city – she thought we wouldn’t make it back in time for the connecting flight. We decided to take a train to Saint-Michel anyway. Near Notre Dame we enjoyed a glass of French champagne and some rabbit pâté.
The masses of tourists in front of Notre Dame on that beautiful autumn afternoon three years ago are not here tonight – there is just a cluster here and there, most with their backs to the cathedral taking selfies.
I stroll over the Pont des Arts, one of the city’s famous bridges. Lovers attach so-called love locks to the bridge, often with their names written on them, then throw the key into the Seine. This tradition may only have started in 2008, but there are already hundreds – if not thousands – of locks of all sizes and colours all along the railings of the bridge. It’s a tradition that has caused concern, as bridges have been damaged as a result. It’s feared that the weight of all that love – or rather, the valiant declaration of it – could cause some of them to collapse.
I read some of the names on the locks: Jackie and Benn (17-05-12 Wedding), Eddy and Delia, Michael and Candice, one has only Rubí … Six months ago there was a name on my lips, too, one I would have liked to write on a lock next to my own and fasten it to this bridge.
* * *
I walk for about half an hour to the Gare d’Austerlitz, the station where the overnight train to Bayonne in the southwest of France awaits me.
Laurika Rauch sings about Austerlitz in her song “Hot Gates”, a moving ballad listing historical battlefields and places of conflict. The station in Paris is named after a major battle fought on 2 December 1805 near the little town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire – one of Napoleon’s most renowned victories.
The lack of sleep is beginning to catch up with me. At a busy intersection I look right as usual before crossing, and just don’t see the motorbike coming from the left. We miss each other by what feels like centimetres … it happens too quickly for me to grasp how close it was. I freeze, then I realise how it happened: I crossed the street as if I were in South Africa. First look right, then left, then right again, as Daantjie Kat taught me on the record player way back in the early eighties – so I just didn’t see the motorbike bearing down on me.
I suppose I could put it down to the shitstorm I’ve been through. Or to exhaustion. Or both. But even an hour later, having a pizza and a beer, I’m still rattled. I could have been killed, or at least seriously injured. My Camino could have ended in Paris before it had even begun. The difference between a sigh of relief and a hell of a drama was literally a fraction of a second. Why did nothing happen to me? Luck? Grace?
“There is no way to know what makes one thing happen, and not another.”
* * *
At