America. Группа авторов
as early as September 2020.
You begin to understand Bayonne when you realize that the Statue of Liberty has its back to the place. You can see only the crown on top of her green copper hair, her face turned toward Manhattan. Bayonne’s small city center is made up of pretty streets, neat rows of modestly proportioned, almost identical wooden houses in pastel shades. All of a sudden there’s a colorful, sixties, Florida-style building that jars with these East Coast surroundings. The public high school, like a huge gothic mansion, is an impressive sight. The public library is housed in a beautiful colonnaded building that dates back to 1904. And then, at the end of the city’s few streets, two colossal bridges sever the space. Light pours forth, the sky is vast, but every walkway is a dead end, cut off by the water. The streets peter out into indeterminate areas, where we drive past gigantic warehouses.
It’s very cold. Wire fencing everywhere. No one around. The chemical factories seem deserted, as if they were operating of their own accord, enormous pipes, pumps, winches, nuts and bolts the size of our heads. At the base of some massive spherical silos, a man in overalls, alone, rails against God. Endless oil tanks lined up ad infinitum. Hummocks of gravel and other materials. A strong sulfurous smell lingers, just as in the much smaller port of my birthplace. We can see only a few workers in fluorescent vests on a military frigate in the dry dock. An abandoned mobile home, covered in brambles, strewn with old domestic items, seems to belong in the opening scene of a David Lynch film. Imagine Twin Peaks without the mountains or the forest, and with the sea instead, broken up by a military-industrial port. It’s as if Bayonne has been breached by a dream fault line that makes strange places accessible.
We pluck up our courage to push open the door of “Starting Point,” which, indeed, turns out to be the departure point for this expedition. We have been wandering around for a little while beneath the vast pylons of a metal bridge that is mind-bogglingly high. From the outside, Starting Point is nothing more than a sign on an off-white, windowless shed. Pole dancing, maybe? A brothel for sailors? We enter a friendly restaurant-bar, open in the middle of the afternoon, where overweight families are eating fried food and old men are watching a football match on the TV.
We gather by the bar. A Budweiser in front of him, Francis Murphy is waiting for his washing to finish its cycle in the laundromat next door. He’s immediately amused by the fact that I was born in Bayonne, France. This anecdote will be my passport everywhere in the city—if in fact I need one, because everybody is extremely welcoming. “Bayonne ham!” Francis exclaims. “Nice and sweet.” He used to be a chef and can’t speak highly enough of the ham from my Bayonne. In the past he found some in Weehawken, not far from here, in a deli that has since closed down. Francis used to work at the Chart House, an upscale restaurant with a view across to Manhattan. The Chart House burned down. Francis launches into a complicated explanation of electrical fires.
I don’t know if Murphy is his real surname, but that’s what he’s called by his buddy, who is as Irish as he is, and who is laden with green scarves he’s selling for St. Patrick’s Day. The two friends have red faces and cube-shaped heads and are downing as many Buds as I am Cokes. Francis is around sixty. He had another buddy here, a native of Tromsø. Tromsø, in Norway, is inside the Arctic Circle. “Well, it turns out that it’s warmer there than in Bayonne, New Jersey. It can get down to minus ten degrees here,” Francis declares, and when I realize he means degrees Fahrenheit, I agree with him: that’s really cold, the equivalent of twenty-three below in degrees Celsius. “It’s because of our geographical position,” he says, “right at the end of the landmass. Because of the sea and the wind. Everything is flat here.”
Bayonne, at the very end of the world, and at the very end of the wind. Francis’s retired buddies have all left the city to go farther south. “You only need to go as few as a hundred miles down this fucking icy coast to find some warmth,” he tells me. Soon, he’s going to move to Atlantic City, the casino town. “I want to gamble myself to death!” Francis used to love Bayonne. But the new bridge has changed everything; Francis’s world has gone, because the rest of the world has arrived, and Francis seems to blame the bridge for exposing the city to people from everywhere else: “The newcomers,” he explains, “haven’t got a clue about the spirit of Bayonne. There are a lot of Spanish, and a real lot of people from the Middle East. Not so many Syrians, no, because of the war, but Egyptians, yes. It’s changed everything.”
“But aren’t you all immigrants here?” I ask.
“We’re all Irish,” he says proudly. “And Italians and Polish as well. And it was the Dutch who founded the city. And, of course, before that, there were the Indians,” he adds, lost in thought now.
We fall silent for a moment. As is often the case when I’m in the United States, I try to imagine the place emptied of concrete and asphalt, populated by nomads and bison.
So it was not the Basque people who founded this city. The name refers only to the idea of a bay, Bay-On. In fact, two large bays and a stretch of water surround it: Newark Bay, New York Bay, and the peculiarly named Kill Van Kull, the strait onto which our little bar, Starting Point, would look out, if it had windows. The demographic details from Wikipedia, which I consult in English so I can present them to Francis, reveal that people of Hispanic origin make up 25 percent of the population, that indeed there are quite a number of Egyptians, and that the city is rather youthful, with an average age of thirty-eight in a total population of 62,000. We also discuss the meaning of the surprising municipal flag, which I have seen flying everywhere alongside the American flag: it looks like a French flag with a boat in the middle, except that the colors could be from Holland in former times. In any case, the famous Bayonne Bridge was for many years the longest steel arch bridge in the world, before it was superseded by four other bridges. It connects New Jersey with Staten Island and, from there, New York.
New York? Francis never goes there anymore. He used to go when he was young, and it was affordable. “I was a hippy.” He had long hair and headed off on his motorcycle to Grateful Dead concerts. Francis is angry as he brings up the long years of redevelopment on the bridge, which have recently made life hell for the city’s inhabitants. “Bayonne was an island,” insists Francis against all the geographical evidence, “but the bridge turned it into a peninsula.”
Perhaps the island he persists in describing to me is a metaphorical one. I am probably underestimating the poetic capabilities of this Trump voter. “It’s a city of fucking Democrats here. I love Trump! Yes, he’s a multimillionaire, but he didn’t take money away from anyone! I blame taxes! Taxes, taxes!” For ten minutes, Francis and I perform a play for which the script is already written. He knows it and he’s enjoying himself; I know it and I’m bored. Fortunately, he’s keeping an eye on his watch, so he can check his laundry. “I hate Clinton,” he says to me out of the blue. “I hate her! We want her executed!” He’s spluttering. “You’re French, you know: I want her guillotined.” And, all at once, I see pure hatred in the eyes of this ordinary man.
Finally, I manage to turn toward the young barman, a very attractive young man with beautiful tattoos. He tells me laconically that he was also born in Bayonne. “Welcome!” He smiles, as if to apologize for Francis, and offers us three Cokes.
So Bayonne, New Jersey, is not famous for anything, apart from the fifth-longest steel arch bridge in the world. And perhaps apart from its monument to the victims of September 11, recommended to us by the young barman. It is very difficult to locate, right at the end of the port area, well beyond Starting Point, and just before the golf course, which is open only in good weather. “Nobody here but me,” says the caretaker of the golf course inside his little heated shed, which looks like a mini Swiss chalet. The clubhouse, on top of an artificial hill, looks like a Bavarian castle crossed with a Breton lighthouse. “Nobody here but me” could be the motto for the whole area, or the motto for us lost travelers.
The monument is a giant drip of nickel suspended inside a tall brick frame, the interior of which looks as if it has been torn away. It’s something of a monstrosity, more than one hundred feet tall, resembling at best a tear, and at worst a saggy scrotum. This Tear Drop Memorial, also known as the Tear of Grief, has been the object of much derision. A plaque informs us that the monument, the work of the Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, dedicated