America. Группа авторов
offer when approached about the monument. It was supposed to be installed in Exchange Place, the district right opposite Ground Zero on the other side the river, but it was considered “too big” (not to mention too ugly). Several municipalities on the Jersey Shore passed the buck, until the city of Bayonne volunteered to take it. The mayor of Jersey City didn’t hesitate to say, “Be my guest!”
“It’s a weird city,” says the guy at the bar of the Broadway Diner, where we’re sheltering to get warm, a long way from Broadway in New York. “Half of this vast land was won on the water. Those Dutch and their polders. And it’s a city you can never leave. It’s a black hole. I’ve traveled all over the US, and there was someone from Bayonne everywhere I went. It’s like the locals try to get away, but they inevitably come back. You see all those big cargo ships leaving, but you can never leave. I’m stuck here too. I’m a fireman, signed on for five years, but even then, I’m sure I won’t be able to leave.” A huge green neon light above our heads promises “The World’s Best Pancakes.” I ask the guy if he’d like to order anything, but he sticks with his coffee. “Call me Jimmy,” he says, offering me his hand. I’m amazed that everyone here knows the other Bayonne. “It’s because there’s an exchange between the public high schools in the two cities. I went to the Catholic high school here. They’re both good schools, we’re lucky. But people here are weird, weird . . .” Jimmy repeats. “For example, a lot of them believe the water is contaminated with some sort of slow poison or hypnosis drug. And they’re not necessarily wrong: with all the industrial chemicals, what exactly is coming out of the tap? And the rest of New Jersey makes fun of us. There’s that awful joke: ‘When you date someone from Bayonne, leave him or her alone.’ And when I was little, I used to watch a cartoon that was supposed to be funny—this was on national television—and one of the characters would say, ‘Smells like Bayonne!’ Tomorrow is the anniversary of the founding of the city—at the town hall. One hundred and fifty years on March 10. Are you coming?” But tomorrow is actually when I have to go back to France. Jimmy gives a shrug.
The two charming waitresses want to introduce us to a young girl they have gone to find at the back of the room. It turns out she is the German language assistant at the high school. There’s a moment of confusion when we try to explain that German and French are not exactly the same. But the simple fact that we are European elicits enthusiasm. It’s impossible to imagine this scene across the river in New York, or in any city accustomed to tourists. I chat with the waitresses. “You speak the most beautiful language in the world,” one of them says to me over and over. She speaks five languages, but not French or German, even though she has a German passport; she’s Turkish, born in Germany, emigrated here. Her female colleague is Puerto Rican; the cashier is a Chinese woman. Antoine, my daughter, and I eat a lot of pancakes with a lot of maple syrup, and order hot chocolates, which arrive crowned with whipped cream, in half-liter cups. “In France, you eat like birds!” laughs the waitress. Jimmy has to leave. We shake hands effusively. When we go to pay, we discover to our surprise that he has picked up the tab.
We decide to drop by the supermarket that has just opened, a Costco starting up in the same semi-deserted area where the ferry terminal will be built. It is quite simply the biggest supermarket my daughter and I have ever seen. America, the greatest country in the world. Costco sells every conceivable product wholesale: groceries, clothes, toiletries, household appliances. For a start, the mayonnaise comes in three-liter jars, the cereal boxes sell by the dozen, and the shoppers all come in large sizes too. Neither the bodies nor the clothes resemble those in New York. The megamarket is clean, brand-new, the employees are smiling in their red T-shirts. The unemployment rate in Bayonne is 4 percent and rents are much lower than in New York, even if the real-estate pressure is increasing. My daughter is playing with a plush bear that is much bigger than she is; there are a dozen or so in a giant tub.
In the car, we listen to Elysian Fields. In 2000, in another time and in another world, before September 11, 2001, this rock band from Brooklyn wrote dreamy, cool songs for an ethereal voice. One song, called “Bayonne,” seems oceans away from my own birthplace, better known for its bawdy festive songs.
The illuminated skyline of Manhattan rises slowly before us, along the winding roads we take to leave the port. There is nowhere else in the United States where I have felt so intensely the sensation of being “on the edge.” Not exactly at the margins, because the people from Bayonne are neither poor nor disadvantaged, even if it seems they are inclined to be melancholic. But they are from the other side, the opposite shore, not even in the suburbs. They are at the end of the world, although the world is right in front of them. They make me think of the global destiny of all Earthlings: spinning around on a planet situated on the edge of the Milky Way—a luminous spiral that leaves us so far away on the outskirts that we see it as a ribbon—stuck on its shining periphery, far from the center.
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