Beach/Umbrella

It doesn't really look like this: Paris Plages at the Hôtel de Ville

August is — or should be — the ideal time to enjoy a couple of Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë’s most noteworthy innovations. For the fourth year, a stretch of road along the Seine has been closed to automobile traffic and a beach has been set up: Paris Plages. There are deck chairs, sand lots, palm trees, a swimming pool, and more steel-drum players than seem possible this far from Jamaica. Elsewhere around town, there are concerts and special events and activities: in front of the town hall, there are sand-filled volleyball courts. The idea is that not everybody in Paris can go on vacation for the month, and that we need a place to sunbathe and frolic.

New this year is the Velib’ program, whereby one can rent bicycles for a nominal fee, at automated bike racks. You pick up your bike at one station, you ride around, and then you drop off the bike at another station near your destination. Depending on the length of your ride, the cost is even less than that of a Métro ticket. Suddenly, there are Velib’ stations everywhere, and the city promises even more of them. Lyon has had a similar program, and I tried it last summer: it’s easy, efficient, and fun, even though Lyon’s hills make Montmartre look like a molehill. The initial response to the Parisian program has been excellent: one million rentals already in just a few weeks.

Delanoë, a Socialist, is a clever guy. Not only does the Velib’ program provide sport and amusement, it may also reduce car traffic and pollution in the city, and that’s one of the mayor’s primary stated goals. And Paris Plages amounts to a social program for people who can’t afford Club Med.

But sometimes Delanoë’s most ingenious schemes run afoul of realities. Shortly after taking office, he determined to open up city government to the people, and he hit upon a symbolic gesture: open house at the town hall. It’s a huge, ornate building, filled with art and history, both somewhat dubious, but most people never saw the inside of the place. So periodically, Delanoë would throw open the doors and greet visitors personally. This was a great plan, until a homophobic nutjob came in and stabbed our gay mayor in the stomach. City government isn’t supposed to be that open — and it isn’t, anymore.

Which way to the beach?
A Velib' cyclist (Velibertin?) on the street

The fly in the ointment of Paris Plages and Velib' this summer has been the weather, one of the coldest and wettest in memory, and very much in contention to be one of the coldest and wettest in history. Granted, the Velib’ program is supposed to function year-round, and Paris is grey and damp most of the year: we may as well get used to riding bikes in the rain. But Paris Plages operates only for a month, and thus far we’ve had few opportunities to treat the Plages as a beach.

On Sunday, for example, we had a scorching hot day. I went to the movies, with the thought that I’d return to the Plages on Monday and catch a few rays.

Naturally, the next morning the temperature dropped some twenty degrees and a storm front moved in. And stayed. As I write this, on Wednesday, 8 August, it’s been raining hard and incessantly for twelve hours. (This affects my DSL, so there’s no telling when I’ll be able to post this.) This year, recognizable summer weather has been limited to rare, isolated outbursts, few lasting more than a single day. Unless you count the month of April, when tank tops and flip-flops were de rigueur.

In cooler weather, the plaza in front of the town hall features not volleyball courts but an ice-skating rink. If next August is anything like this one, we’ll need to break out the skates, not the Speedos. And if this winter and spring bring anything like the mildness of last winter and the heat of last March and April, we’ll want the volleyballs and sunscreen.

Meanwhile, Al Gore should consider running not for President of the United States but for Mayor of Paris. Because the weather is starting to make me nervous.

Read more!

To Translate Is to Betray

Dans Paris: Garrel and Duris conjugate the French verb salinger

Going to the movies in France means that French movies are presented without subtitles in English: deal with it. I’ve encountered one exception to this rule. When my brother visited me in 2005, we saw a subtitled print of De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped) that had been sent, apparently by a mistake of the film’s distributor, to a little cinema on the Left Bank. Given the theater’s proximity to the Sorbonne and its many hundreds of foreign students, this may have been a blessing to many. Surely my brother thought so — his French is pretty good, but it helped to have the crutch of the subtitles. For my part, the experience was frustrating, because I understood the dialogue without difficulty, while I reflected on the number of French movies I’ve seen that really needed subtitles to facilitate my comprehension of such minor things as what the hell was going on. (The last line of Arnaud Desplechin’s Rois et Reine was absolutely crucial and thoroughly unintelligible to this listener.)

I average about 85 percent comprehension, according to my unscientific estimate, of the dialogue in French movies. I’m abetted by the French film industry’s penchant for small, intimate pictures in which only a couple of people with theater-standard (i.e., not regional) accents are talking in very quiet settings. If several people are talking at once, or if there are American-style car chases and explosions, my comprehension stumbles, then plummets.

Say what? Emmanuelle Devos in Rois et Reine

If the picture has been dubbed, my comprehension suffers, too: to my surprise, it turns out that I often lip-read without knowing it. A great deal of language depends on what we don’t hear. If I’m in a crowded restaurant, I can follow an English conversation easily, because I know the language so well that I can fill in the gaps of what I haven’t really heard. Because my command of French isn’t so thorough, I have more difficulty.

The less I think, the better I understand. If I falter over one word, I miss everything that follows, and I get lost. I compare the movie-going experience to that of riding in an airplane. The best thing is to sit back, take off and fly, without trying to break down the apparatus, understand its mechanisms, linger over a detail — because if I do, the plane will take off without me — or crash altogether.

The still-gorgeous Marie-France Pisier and Duris, Dans Paris

The review in today’s New York Times for Christophe Honoré’s Dans Paris raises a case in point. I understood a great deal of the picture, when I saw it last year, but there were a few points of which I remained uncertain, and I’m interested to know what the response is in the States, where audiences will have the benefit of subtitles. (The Times review was excellent.)

At first glance, Dans Paris is a kind of homage to the French New Wave of the 1960s, transplanted to the present day. But it’s also an homage to J.D. Salinger, and as I watched, I kept thinking, “This is like a Glass story in French.” And then, voilà, we see one of the characters reading Franny and Zooey. One brother (Romain Duris) is in a colossal funk after breaking up with his girlfriend. He returns to his family’s apartment and confines himself to his childhood bedroom (sound familiar?), never leaving the bed. His younger brother (Louis Garrel), tries to break through to him, but for the most part he’s engaged in a carefree tour of other beds, sleeping with several women and loving every minute. But the dialogue, much of which seems to be improvised, the naturalistic delivery, and the busy camerawork sometimes challenged my understanding — certainly they challenged my appreciation of subtleties of character development. If there were specific textual references to Salinger, I missed them. See the picture and tell me what you think.

Irregular lovers: Hesmé, Sagnier and Garrel in Les chansons d'amour

Honoré and Garrel teamed up again for the surprise hit of the summer, Les chansons d’amour (The Songs of Love), which again pays homage to the New Wave, notably Truffaut, as well as to the contemporaneous musical fantasies of Jacques Demy. One shot in particular refers directly (albeit in a radically different context) to a famous shot of Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in Demy’s Les demoiselles de Rochefort, and just in case you missed the point, Honoré has cast Deneuve’s daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, in a supporting role. Though I had no problem with the dialogue, Chansons posed another kind of translation problem for me.

As the movie opens, we discover Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), who’s unsure of her boyfriend, Ismaël (Garrel again), and trying everything in her power to reach him, to the point that she’s opened up their relationship: they’re now in a threeway with Alice (Clotilde Hesmé). (Hesmé also played Garrel’s girlfriend in Les amants réguliers, a film about the May 1968 uprisings by Garrel’s father, and a kind of revision of Bertolucci’s overheated The Innocents, which also starred … Louis Garrel.) Julie’s sudden death, a beautifully directed sequence, denies her the answers she’s seeking, and it sends Ismaël into a tailspin. It turns out that he doesn’t know what he wants, and so long as Julie was alive, he didn’t have to figure it out. Now he does. The story’s resolution is unexpected and joyous.

And they sing all the way through it, in a series of breathy pop numbers written by Alex Beaupain. Granted, he’s no Michel Legrand (who wrote the music for Demy’s films), but I loved the score. I walked out of the movie theater and went straight to the FNAC store to buy the album. Only later did I learn that the music is terrible.

I feel a song coming on: Garrel in Chansons

This is alarming, since a great deal of my identity, my sense of myself, is predicated on my confidence in my exquisite musical taste. But the inferiority of the chansons of Chansons was confirmed by no less an authority than my friend David Triestram, a professional accompanist and vocal coach. And even apart from his distinguished credentials, how do you mistrust the musical judgment of a man whose name evokes at once the singing King of Ancient Israel and Wagner’s lovesick knight? Meanwhile, my roommate Bernard dismissed the album as “ringard de chez ringard” (beyond tacky) and forbade me to play it when he’s in the apartment.

Most French pop music isn’t sung so much as whispered or growled. Part of the reason for this lies in the French language itself: certain sounds, especially the nasal N and the throaty R, don’t lend themselves to certain kinds of vocal production. Nobody over here knows how to do a Broadway belt, for example, while American-style rap has been a huge success. Full-out singing is limited to old stalwarts, such as Piaf and Aznavour, who tend (or tended) to cheat by rolling or gargling Rs. Even among classically trained singers, only a handful can respect linguistic sonorities while maintaining a lyric line in French. A great deal of French music struggles to address this problem, actually, and it’s for this reason that Lully and Rameau’s operas show less thundering bravado than those of Handel, and that so much of French art song is, as Anna Russell described it, “wispy.”

French pop is melodically wispy, too, and Beaupain’s chansons fit that bill. A little too well, as it happens. And the cast, not a real singer among the lot, hardly troubles with the scant melody they’re given to work with. Triestram observed that the microphones must have been positioned somewhere deep inside their anatomies. And he suggested where that might have been.

So the question now stands: why did I like this music? Did I think the lyrics were better than they are, simply because I understood them? Was I swept away by the plot, characters, and immensely appealing actors in Honoré’s films, or have I become that most dreaded of clichés, the immigrant whose taste does not survive transplantation from his native to his adopted culture? Am I just another tacky foreigner?

Not just another pretty face: the ubiquitous Louis Garrel

It may be worth noting that Louis Garrel is among the rare French movie stars whom I’ve seen in person. He turns out to be even slimmer than he appears onscreen, and my eye doesn’t perceive the beau-laid traits that the camera lingers on and emphasizes: he’s an extremely good-looking guy. But it’s the venue that matters, in this discussion, for I saw him in the lobby of the Palais Garnier, the night of Joyce DiDonato’s final dress rehearsal for Mozart’s Idomeneo.

So maybe he knows more about music than we thought. And, my appreciation for Mozart (and DiDonato) notwithstanding, maybe I know less.

Read more!

Fidel Castro

A notorious embrace: Fidel and Bill, April, 1996
Original Photo by Patrick Pagnano for CBS News

Fidel Castro turns 81 on 13 August. This may come as a surprise, given his parlous state of health in recent years — already we suspected he was severely ill when we met him, 11 years ago. When he greeted Dan Rather with one of his trademark hugs, Dan seemed startled. Later he turned to the rest of us and said, “Does he seem puffy to you?”

Since I’d never been hugged by Castro before, I had no point of reference. The closest I’d ever gotten to Castro had been the far side of the newsroom one day when he came for a studio tour, in the course of a visit to New York to address the United Nations. So throughout the rest of the week we spent with him in Cuba, I kept looking for signs of illness and frailty.

We’ve since had proof of his illness, albeit with scant detail on what, precisely, he’s been suffering from. His public appearances are very rare now. But he endures. And that may come as a surprise, too, to those who actually believed the U.S. government’s persistent nonsense about the efficacy of its embargo, which was guaranteed to drive the man out of power, and possibly into an early grave, 40 years ago. I have sometimes wondered if the most fervent anti-Castro activists in America weren’t all double agents of some sort, since their insistence on continued hostility toward the Cuban President has made it so much easier for the old boy to retain his power: he could always blame his failures on the big bad neighbor, and rally his people against the American menace.

Even now, the U.S. pushes Castro and Hugo Chávez ever closer, and Cuba builds stronger ties to China, effectively filling the gap left when the Soviet Union crumbled, leaving the island without a patron. Although the state of Cuba was dire when I went there in 1996, Castro has rebounded since, and it’s worth asking whether the outcome might have been different, had the U.S. tried a different policy at the moment when Cuba was at its weakest and most isolated.

But instead the United States Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened and deepened the embargo, in March 1996. There’s no doubt that Castro was worried by this move and its implications. Instantly, there were “spontaneous demonstrations” in the streets of Cuba, protesting the new American law. He was in hot water already, since a few weeks earlier the Cuban air force had shot down two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro organization from Florida. The Brothers deliberately provoked Castro, and though any sovereign nation would have taken action against such intruders, the incident made Cuba — and therefore Castro himself — look bad. Ever a wily media manipulator, Castro knew he needed a new PR campaign. So when CBS News proposed an hour-long documentary, timed to his seventieth birthday, Castro accepted.

He granted us extraordinary access, three full days of his time. This struck some of us as difficult to understand, and at one point somebody asked him whether he didn’t have better things to do with at least some part of his time. “Oh, no,” he replied, “this is my vacation.” He got to know most of us by name, and he bestowed on me a nickname: el Novelista. Or, in his accented Spanish, “el Nobelita.”

Dan had interviewed Castro many times before. One of the Cuban officials assigned to us reported that, according to their calculations, Dan had spent more time than any other American journalist with the Presidente. Contrary to what some on the far right may think, often the conversations between Dan and Fidel were less like an interview and more like an argument in a barroom, two crusty old debaters going at it over many glasses of scotch, late into the night. They respected each other, and they resembled each other: they were both wily survivors who had overcome many obstacles to endure, despite the predictions (and active hostility) of many. Their relationship reminded me of that between Dan and Bob Dole, and I mentioned it to them. Fidel just stared at me.

Dan pressed forward, however, and quoted Faulkner, to the effect that enduring is not the same as prevailing. “You didn’t say we prevailed,” he said.

“It was an accident,” I replied.

Unquestionably, Fidel enjoyed himself, frequently turning to our producer, the CBS News vice-president Linda Mason, and saying, “Well, what do we do next?” as if he were a newsroom intern. And with the practiced charm of an expert seducer, he answered Linda’s instructions: “We must always do what Lindas [pretty girls] tell us.”

He took us to the Sierra Maestra mountains, where he commanded guerrilla attacks against Batista; to the Museum of the Revolution, where he showed us the yacht, the Granma, that brought him and his warriors back to Cuba from exile in Mexico; and he took Dan (but not me) to the Bay of Pigs and walked him through his campaign there. Those were, in their way, happier times for him, when he was young and victorious, and the memories energized him.

He enjoys being the center of attention, and he doesn’t need an American news team to get it. He has only to get in his Mercedes and drive — anywhere — and the people will flock to him. His every public appearance is a rally. I can’t imagine a political figure, or a rock star or television anchor, who wouldn’t envy him at least a little.

Of course, he’s a dictator, and his people turn out because they’re ordered to do so. That their love may not be completely trustworthy is made clear by the Kalashnikov he keeps strapped to the back of the driver’s seat of that Mercedes, in case he needs to defend himself. Nevertheless, in the rural areas we visited together (a sugar factory, a country school), the people’s enthusiasm seemed more sincere: alternative forms of entertainment are few. What else are you going to do for a good time? But in Havana, I got the unavoidable feeling that a lot of the people were there because they were afraid of what would happen to them if they didn’t turn out.

If Fidel himself made that distinction, he didn’t show it. It looked like love, it sounded like love, and he accepted it as love.

With a gun beside him, and a battery of security people around him.

(Sometimes their presence was reassuring to me. If I got swept away in the crowds, or lost in the streets of Havana, I knew that Cuban security wasn’t going to leave me stranded: eventually, they’d track me down. The American President’s security, by contrast, doesn’t really care where you wind up, so long as you don’t get near the President. At one point I noticed one of the Cuban security guys smiling at me in greeting, and one of our producers, Kristina Borjesson, said, “He’s probably assigned to you — he’s studied your case file so long, he feels as if he knows you personally.”)

Fidel is a tall man, taller than Dan, taller than anyone else in his (or Dan’s) entourage. He has the face of an El Greco saint (though let it be remembered that Greco got his models from madhouses) or a Renaissance artist — Michelangelo, for example, without the broken nose. During the long sit-down interview on our penultimate night in Havana, I slipped out my sketchpad and drew that face, as I sat in the shadows and listened. (A pity I don’t have a scanner, or you could see that picture now.)

His hands are large and well-shaped, and he gestures constantly, even for a Latin, with grace and precision. One particular gesture indicates the depth of the thought he’s expressing, the length of time he’s considered it, the philosophical value of it: he points his index finger and raises it, backward, to his forehead, then pulls it away sharply.

For a while, I tried to incorporate that gesture into my own repertory, but it is too much work. Fidel is a very great actor, and although people tend to wonder what would have happened if he’d gone into baseball for a living, I wonder what would have happened if he’d gone into theater. I’d pay any amount of money to see his Prospero. He was born to play that part. (Actually, he does play that part, exercising rough magic to dominate a tropical island.)

In the Sierra Maestras (but not with me)

His charisma (which I’ve discussed here) is dazzling. Nothing could have prepared me for that, even though, logically, I tell myself that of course he’s charismatic, because he must be. He wouldn’t have attained or held his position if he weren’t.

He is also funny, and it’s unfortunate that I wasn’t able to take notes while I was with him, because the jokes are lost now: I’m working from 45 pages I wrote the week I got back to New York. I didn’t expect the humor, either, perhaps because the Cold War propaganda I received in public school could permit no admirable traits to dilute its portrait of a Communist. But Fidel is a complex guy.

I’m prepared to believe, for example, that he sincerely wanted to change Cuba for the better, to eradicate the spiritual and economic prostitution of Cuba’s society. Under Batista and for too long in Cuba’s history, too many people would do just about anything for a Yankee dollar. Fidel wanted to change that. He wanted to eliminate crime, especially the American mafia, and he wanted to give Cuba’s mostly non-white population opportunities to prosper with dignity. He wanted to bring literacy and medical care to the people.

Like it or not, he did all those things, too: that’s one reason I believe he was sincere in at least some of his ideals. When we visited him, the cutoff of Soviet aid had forced Cuba to return to the tourist trade — in reluctant, localized doses — and you could see that Fidel didn’t like it, not only because there’s really nothing more capitalist than tourism, but because it made his people subservient to strangers. It troubled him visibly to know that bellboys earned more than doctors. He knew, as well as we did, that if we wandered outside the Hotel Nacional in the evening, we wouldn’t have to walk far before we’d be offered the sale of cigars and rum, smuggled out of the factory by workers who couldn’t survive on the state-regulated wage. And cigars and rum weren’t the worst: you could buy a girl, too, or a boy, or several.

He didn’t really talk about these things much. You could see it in his eyes, though. He wasn’t defeated, but he was, in a way, grieving.

How to reconcile that with the man who has violently suppressed opposition, jailed dissidents, brutalized and killed so many of his people? It’s not enough to quote Lord Acton, though it’s clear that power corrupted Fidel. He traded Yankee influence for Soviet influence, and Cuba remained poor and weak. He taught his people to read and write, but he censored their books and newspapers — and when I was in Cuba, there was hardly any paper at all. He educated them in politics, but they weren’t allowed to disagree. (“In our society, we need unity more than dissent,” he told Dan.) He gave them health care, but not medicine. He promised his people freedom of all kinds, but he jailed homosexuals, too, and people of religious faith.

There’s a fine movie called Strawberry and Chocolate in which a gay Cuban, an early and avid, very idealistic supporter of Fidel, tries to reconcile the promise of the revolution and the later repression. He can’t do it. Surprisingly, the film was made in Cuba, under Castro’s regime. When we returned to Havana for John Paul II’s visit, in 1997, the protagonist’s apartment had been turned into a restaurant, part of the limited privatization of the new Cuban economy.

Throughout our visit, Fidel was accompanied by a translator, a woman about my age, named Juanita Vera. She was a prodigy, giving rapid-fire translation of everything Fidel and Dan said, though both were champion talkers, especially in each other’s company. During the long sit-down interview, she asked for a pad of paper, and got it. We assumed she wanted it, as most translators would, to take notes. In fact, one of the cameramen picked up the pad after the interview was over, and he found it covered with doodles. At another point in that interview, one of the cameramen swore that Juanita Vera had fallen asleep. Yet she never missed a word.

The presence of a translator had a couple of curious effects. One was that her voice became Fidel’s, and you forgot she was there at all. Yet she was there, and for hours at a time she and I engaged in a sly, silent second conversation, underneath that of our bosses: raised eyebrows and smiles reacting to what the two men said. I felt a real affinity for her, but I realized later that we’d hardly exchanged two words directly.

She was reading Primary Colors, and she asked us who we thought had written it, and how much of it was true: precisely the cocktail party guessing game that all Washington and most of New York were playing. Fidel was eager to read the book, just as soon as Juanita Vera translated it for him.

We were drinking cocktails, too, as we talked about the book: “This is a mojito, a Cuban specialty,” Fidel said to me. “I hope you like it.”

A few minutes later, Dan mentioned that someone needed balls to do something. Juanita translated everything except “balls,” and so I pitched in, “Cojones.” Only to realize that, although it’s a word used by everyone you ever saw in New York City, in Havana cojones is not a word for nice people like Juanita (or Fidel, for that matter, who looked at me as if to say, “Yes, I understood without your help, thank you”).

Back at the hotel, Dan remarked that every time he came to Cuba, he found Fidel surrounded by an entirely new group of people. (That’s not always, or not any longer, quite true: his chief of staff at the time, so young that people called him “Fidel’s Stephanopoulos,” was Felipe Pérez Roque, who is now foreign minister.) We wondered what would become of Juanita Vera. I don’t know: I fear it would be impolitic to inquire.

During the long sit-down interview, Dan asked Fidel about his hobbies. We had heard that he liked to cook. Fidel got a bit wistful, and said that the press of his official duties was such that he no longer had time to cook. (Never mind that plenty of people, in Cuba and the United States, would be happy to help him find the time and lose the duties.) However, he said, it was possible that at dinner that night we might be served one of his old recipes.

That recipe turned out to be lobster, and Fidel, waxing nostalgic again, talked of his student days, when he and his friends would cook dinner and talk politics and dream of revolution, long into the night. I thought of Rena Grant, and I pointed out that in the U.S., very few revolutionary students I knew could afford lobster, even if they cooked it themselves. But Fidel ignored my irony.

The sit-down interview had lasted several hours, during which Dan played Fidel like a fiddle, making a provocative remark whenever the older man’s energy seemed to fail. Now it was quite late, but we drank our cocktails and then seated ourselves at a long table in a reception room in a parliamentary building. (I can’t remember which.) It was a terrific meal, and though the lobster may have been counter-revolutionary, it was delicious.

The complete menu: salad, then soup, then lobster tail, then a pork dish with potato purée, then ice cream with cookies. And a lot of wine.

Much of the conversation tended, naturally, to a dialogue between Dan and Fidel, opposite each other in the middle of the table. The other Cubans remained respectfully silent, at the far end of the table, or spoke softly in Spanish among themselves, but in the true democratic spirit of CBS News, the other Americans piped up quite often in the “grownups” discussion.

At one point, Fidel told Dan that he’d been requested to grant an interview to John Kennedy, Jr., who had recently launched his political magazine, George. Did Dan think this was a good idea, Fidel wanted to know, and what did Dan think of Kennedy?

Dan rose to fame with his coverage of the assassination of John’s father, and Dan’s son worked in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with John. His feelings for the two Kennedys were profound and somewhat romanticized, as he demonstrated by launching into an aria of praise for the younger man. John was very intelligent, Dan said, hardworking and admirable, devoted to his mother, kind to small animals, and also very witty.

Now, I’d known John in college, and although he was a great guy, and treated me very kindly despite sleeping with half the women I had crushes on, you wouldn’t call him witty. That was too much for me — I burst out laughing.

Fidel perked up. “Que dice el Novelista?” he said to Juanita Vera.

Ooops.

But I rallied, and in what may prove to be the most diplomatic statement of my life, I compared John to Prince Hal ("Enrique Cinco"), saying that though he may have been too much interested in his own pleasure as a young man, we all believe he was maturing and would be a great king, one day soon.

Very often when I was included in the conversation, we talked of Shakespeare that trip. Fidel displayed a familiarity with the major works, though he preferred Cervantes and, among English-speaking authors, Hemingway, whom he knew personally.

The evening wore on. It was long past midnight now, and dessert was followed by digestifs and cigars. Fidel no longer smoked, he said, out of concern for the health of his staff — and not, by implication, out of any concern for his own health. But he encouraged us to smoke. In those days, Dan needed little encouragement to smoke a good cigar, and since Cuban cigars were outlawed under Helms-Burton, he seized the opportunity and lit up. I’d given up cigarettes a few years earlier, but I figured this didn’t even count: I was with Castro in Cuba, for pity’s sake. I chose a cigarillo, but I didn’t like it, and put it out after a couple of puffs. Dan, however, was smoking like a chimney.

Quietly, Felipe Pérez Roque, who was seated between Dan and me, pushed back from the table and took an inhaler from his pocket.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

"Oh, it is nothing," Felipe said in English. "I am asthmatic."

"I can see that," I said. “Do you want to trade places with someone? Do you want me to ask Mr. Rather to stop?”

“No, no, it’s all right,” Felipe said.

Dan took no notice of this, and Felipe suffered in silence.

Since I wasn’t partaking of the tobacco, and since the mojito turned out to be pretty spiffy, I thought I would try whatever Fidel was drinking. I signaled one of the waiters and asked what it was.

“Fra Angelico, señor.”

Damn. I was hoping for something exotic and Cuban. I sent the waiter away again, then thought better of it, then thought better again.

Talk of the Kennedys had gotten to Dan, and he addressed Fidel. “We’ve known each other a long time,” he said in a thick voice, “and I’m asking you, as a man. Did you have anything to do with the assassination?”

"No — nothing," came the answer. "Many things have been said about me, but never that I was crazy. I was trying to improve relations between Cuba and the United States. What would killing your president do to advance my goals? I knew that the political philosophies would outlast one man. Why would I kill Kennedy? Solely for vengeance? That vengeance would cost me too much. No, I had nothing to do with it!"

He and Dan were staring each other in the face, and it was as if Juanita didn't exist, although of course it was only her voice they understood.

Fidel went on, talking about his belief that Oswald could not have acted alone. He knew the kind of rifle Oswald was said to have used, he said, and the scope, and he didn't think Oswald could have fired all the shots in the time allowed. Fidel pointed out that he was a pretty good marksman in his day, and during the revolution they would welcome new recruits by using them in target practice: they'd set up an object a foot away from the recruit and Fidel would fire. Sometimes recruits would bring the target even closer to themselves, to demonstrate their faith in Fidel, "even between their legs," he said.

"Dan does the same thing for new hires at CBS," I said.

"What I cannot understand is why Oswald wanted to come to Cuba," Fidel went on. Dan ascribed the motivation to Oswald's being crazy, to Marina's refusal to sleep with him, and so on. I offered that the desire to come to Cuba was quite logical. "If one is, as Oswald probably was, a bit crazy and very much desirous of a certain kind of attention, in those days he might have expected to get that attention by defecting to the Soviet Union. When he didn't get the attention he thought he deserved, he defected back to the United States. Still he didn't get the attention. So the next logical step, Mr. President, was you."

Surely that had occurred to him already, but Fidel nodded thoughtfully. He told us that he felt a strong connection to the Kennedys, as if he were unaware of the reports of bad feeling they bore him, and he asked more questions about Jackie, Caroline, and John.

At last it was time to leave, and Fidel escorted us to the front entrance of the building. Standing at the top of a flight of steps, he hugged each of us in full revolutionary comrade-style. Yet as he embraced me, I thought not of revolution but of my grandfather, an old man bidding me farewell after a good meal.

You talk about charisma.

And he said to me in Spanish what was, as near as I could make out, "I look forward to reading your novel."

The next morning we were all pretty worn out. Fidel had proposed a trip to his hometown, but mercifully we’d decided against that. We went to a hospital that specialized in heart surgery, both so that Fidel could tout his universal health care and Dan could tout the lack of medicine. (Fidel blamed that on the embargo.) After touring the facility and talking a bit longer, the last interview was complete, and it was time to say goodbye. Fidel approached me, and because he had embraced me the night before, I knew what was coming: one last hug.

Over his shoulder I saw Patrick Pagnano, the photographer working for CBS, with his camera at the ready, and I knew in that instant what my dad was going to get for Fathers Day: a big picture of his elder son getting hugged by a Communist dictator. Patrick clicked off three pictures, in fact, and they’re great — me with a shit-eating grin and Fidel looking like a Fidel Castro impersonator, in his green fatigues, his own icon.

Those pictures are among the few from my CBS career in which Dan, not I, is obscured in the background. Patrick gave me not only prints but also color Xeroxes on poster-sized paper, which I put up wherever I go. When the press attaché from the Cuban Mission to the U.N. visited my office at CBS, he squawked, “Why do you have a picture like that? I don’t have a picture like that!”

My dad worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence during the Cold War, and he’s no fan of Communism. I took one of the poster-sized pictures and mounted it on a larger piece of paper with the caption: “The threat of International Communism has not abated! Warning: Your child could be next!” He hung it in his office.

When we returned to Havana for the Pope’s visit, Fidel was being coy with the press. There were vague assurances that maybe he was thinking about possibly granting one interview, and that perhaps Dan might get it, but really, the Presidente didn’t want to upstage the Pope, but on the other hand he might turn up at the Habana Libre Hotel one night, or on the other hand he might not.

Then Monicagate broke out, and every American news crew dashed back to Washington. Fidel himself had been upstaged — and he was probably kicking himself.

He was one of the most fascinating and most troubling characters I'll ever encounter, and I'll never meet him again.

Read more!

Un Petit Cahier du Cinéma

Cet habit me donne de l'esprit:
Luchini and Duris in the costume comedy Molière

Movie-going is one of the distinct pleasures of life in France. The French take their movies seriously, and their movie theaters are clean, comfortable and numerous, their audiences avid and respectful, their programming varied. They still have repertory cinema in this country, meaning that I can go back and fill in gaps in my education, review old favorites and discover new pleasures in the work of great directors and actors. It’s a thrill to see an old comedy by Lubitsch or Sturges or Keaton not in the isolation of my living-room but in the company of strangers in a darkened space far from my home: the jokes are better, I think, when they’re shared — as they were meant to be. And the movie theaters are air-conditioned, too, according to the French theory that air-conditioning isn’t supposed to make the air cold, as in the U.S., but merely not hot anymore. Likewise, in winter, heating is relative: not as cold as it is outside. Some days, that’s excuse enough for me to see three or four pictures in a row.

I sometimes chide myself for not taking notes on all the movies I see. I ought to be compiling my own cinema notebooks (Cahiers du cinéma), to reflect upon later. The French make a prodigious amount of movies, and since most of these are low-budget, talky, intimate psychological dramas with the same actors, the pictures do run together after a while. Because some of the more interesting recent French pictures are now getting a U.S. release, I offer a few notes — not least because, to read the reviews in the U.S. press, it’s not clear I see the same picture here that you get to see over there.

At the very least, something seems to get lost in translation, and that’s the case with Molière, a light comedy that got clobbered by most American critics. The great French playwright’s biography is marked by a “dark period,” during which we know very little about his activities: as the leader of a traveling theater troupe, he crisscrossed the provinces, honing his craft and developing a reputation that would ultimately bring him to Paris and immortal fame. But there are few records, and French schoolchildren often are required to speculate on what really happened to him during this time.

That seems to be what the American critics didn’t grasp, because — very much in the vein of Shakespeare in Love — screenwriters Laurent Tirard and Grégoire Vigneron depict the young Molière encountering characters and situations that would inspire a handful of his greatest plays (The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Misanthrope, The Miser, and especially Tartuffe). American critics spluttered that the screenplay thereby minimizes Molière’s genius, in its suggestion that a writer can draw inspiration only from experience. But they’re taking much too seriously a script that’s meant to be a kind of party game — or an extension of the classroom assignments typical in France. (Not only “What happened to Molière during the dark period?” but “You are Emma Bovary. Write a love-letter to Jean Valjean.”)

It’s to be argued further that any satirist must get his material from real life: he must observe his targets in order to depict their foibles. In some cases, we know precisely which writers, doctors and courtiers Molière was trying to skewer: even Tartuffe has real-life models.

Outstanding in his field: Duris as Molière

Set aside all this lit-crit, and Tirard’s movie is quite entertaining, especially if you know the plays in question: oh, look, it’s the table scene from Tartuffe! There’s a line from The Miser! There’s Célimène from The Misanthrope! The actors are very much in on the joke, particularly Fabrice Luchini as the model for the Bourgeois Gentleman. Luchini is one of France’s finest actors — ever — and in addition to crafty, scene-stealing performances in dozens of films, he’s also played quite a bit of classical theater. He can improvise soliloquies of heroic verse on the spot, and he has memorized whole chunks of canonical texts: nobody, not even Charles de Gaulle, has ever taken more pleasure in the French language. He’s relishing every minute of Molière, and when the picture succeeds, it’s usually because of something he’s said or done. (Happily, his funniest bit isn’t a speech, it’s a silent reaction shot.)

His costar is Romain Duris, a scruffy, menacing presence in most of his pictures — and few American critics were persuaded by his foray into period comedy. I daresay the real Molière would have had more fun if he’d been called upon to disguise himself, enter the household of a wealthy man, and engage in intricate romantic machinations. But Tirard is striving for less bravado and more discomfort, and that’s what Duris gives him — and it’s often very funny. American critics seem to think Molière is his first comedy, but apparently they’ve forgotten his adorable bumbling in Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls: it’s not as if the guy doesn’t know how to do pratfalls.

Duris is one of several French actors who try to stretch themselves by taking on a variety of projects. The movie business in this country is fiercely cliquish, and leading parts are assigned always to the same few dozen artists, with the result that a popular star can, and usually does, make four or five pictures a year. It’s almost like Hollywood under the studio system: you could be certain to see Sydney Greenstreet in a Warner Brothers picture, and you can be sure to see Emmanuelle Béart or Catherine Deneuve in a French picture. (Béart consistently plays “angry girl,” and at this rate of exposure, she’s tedious; Deneuve stretches herself as an artist, but she also stretches her flesh, undergoing so much plastic surgery that it’s become unnerving to watch her.)

But some French actors stand outside the system, sometimes by choice, sometimes because they got pushed out. It’s not clear which was the case with Julie Delpy, and it’s probable that she’s too smart to have permitted herself to turn into another Emmanuelle Béart or Natacha Régnier — but she never had the opportunity. Instead, Delpy has developed her talents as a writer and musician, and with 2 Days in Paris she makes her debut as director. She also wrote the screenplay, edited the film, and provided most of the music.

Yes, you're eating Thumper: Delpy and Goldberg in 2 Days

The result is a whimsical, immensely appealing, very personal story of a Franco-American couple confronting clashing cultures and their own communications breakdown. The movie is laced with clever observations about the differences between French and Americans, and the differences between men and women, and it’s great witty, sometimes farcical fun — right up until the finale, when the two lovers (Delpy and Adam Goldberg, her real-life ex-boyfriend) decide whether to stick together or break up. It’s the rare French screenplay that doesn’t peter out in the third act. Delpy keeps her camera close and active, and she elicits terrific performances from a cast that also includes her real-life parents and several close friends. I’m eager to see more movies from her.

The singer Edith Piaf is something like a saint in France, one grade shy of Joan of Arc status, and with so many musical biographies coming out of the U.S. these days, it was a matter of time before the French made another Piaf movie: La Môme (The Kid), or as it’s known in the States, La Vie en Rose, after Piaf’s most famous song. Director/screenwriter Olivier Dahan tried to avoid a few biopic conventions, mostly by shattering chronological structure: this will be confusing to Americans and indeed to anybody who doesn’t know Piaf’s story by heart. Though the camerawork is spectacular, the editing seldom clarifies the plot.

Cotillard as Saint Edith, Our Lady of Paris

La Môme gives us an inkling, if only a tiny one, of why Piaf’s songs remain so compelling, but you also get a lot of melodrama and substance abuse, just like Ray, just like Walk the Line, just like What’s Love Got to Do with It?, just like….

Marion Cotillard’s portrayal of Piaf is rangy, furious and vivid (though she wears so much prosthetic makeup that I’ve taken to calling the movie La Momie — the mummy). She’s backed up by fleet, intelligent performances from the wonderful Sylvie Testud and Catherine Allegret (Simone Signoret’s daughter), among others.

Yesterday I finally got around to seeing Paris, je t’aime, an anthology picture with contributions from a brace of French and American directors, depicting each of the capital’s twenty arrondissements. Most of the directors offer skimpy, even threadbare vignettes, and the movie is mostly unsatisfying. Although you get plenty of atmospheric scenery and performances from terrific actors (including several of my favorites: Gena Rowlands, Juliette Binoche, Fanny Ardant, Bob Hoskins, Yolande Moreau and Steve Buscemi), you have to wait until the end of the movie before you get anything you can really sink your teeth into — not withstanding Vincenzo Natali’s artsy vampire sequence starring Elijah Wood.

Elle n'a pas la plume de sa tante:
Martindale in Paris, je t'aime

In “14th Arrondissement,” Alexander Payne (Sideways, About Schmidt) gives us a beautifully crafted snapshot of what it’s like to be alone and middle-aged and American in this big, noisy, extravagantly romantic city. Margo Martindale plays a postal worker from Denver who’s dreamed all her life of coming to Paris. She saves up her money, learns French (fluidly, though with a shaky accent), and eschews group tours in favor of an adventure on her own. In a voice-over narration, presumably Martindale reading an assignment for French class back home, she tells of her discoveries. Much of this is great fun, but Martindale’s solitude becomes more and more urgent, as when she realizes that she’s got no one to turn to and say, “Isn’t this beautiful?” Baby, I've been there. By the end, she experiences an epiphany — I won’t tell you what it is, but it brought tears in my eyes. It's a helluva performance.

The Parisian cinemas are where I discovered Gena Rowlands, but as of yesterday, they're also where I discovered Margo Martindale, and it's saying something that I recommend Paris, je t'aime more for Martindale's work than for Rowlands'. (For one thing, it's saying that Payne's direction is superior to that of Frédéric Auburtin and Gérard Depardieu, who guided Rowlands.)

If any of these pictures come your way, it's worth your while to see them. At the very least, it beats standing outside in the heat.

Read more!

Freshman Counseling: You and Your New Roommate

The Temple of Dorm, formerly known as West Quad
Brown University, Providence, RI

As the beginning of the academic year approaches, we remind younger readers that there is no more important business in life than those first, crucial hours with your college roommate.

The first time you leave your dirty socks on his/her side of the room, you’re probably denying yourself an Old Boy/Girl Network connection that would have brought you a starting salary in the high six figures, membership in exclusive country clubs, and a new puppy, all within weeks of your college graduation.

In the shorter term, a good roommate relationship can help you cope with school pressures and social anxieties, introduce you to potential dates, and provide you with nachos and beer you’ll never have to pay for.

You and your roommate must communicate constantly, even when you have nothing to say. You and he/she should share new experiences, respect each other’s limits, and remember at all times that rooming together is really just practice for living with a lover or spouse. So if you can’t get along with your roommate, your chances of ever having a happy, fulfilling sex life are nil. You may as well give up now.

And you thought choosing a college was high-pressure! The ways you do or don’t get along with your roommate can determine your entire future.


Don’t believe me? Consider this:

* Former Vice-President Al Gore and actors Tommy Lee Jones, Kris Kristofferson, and John Hurt were all roommates at Harvard, either in reality or else in the film Heaven’s Gate, which you’re too young to remember.

* Tommy Lee Jones was also Ryan O’Neal’s roommate at Harvard, but that was a different movie.

* Although I didn’t go to Harvard, I once got a job because my college roommate used to date the college roommate of the woman who hired me. And my college roommate now teaches at Harvard. (Uncanny, isn’t it?)

* Sally Boldt of Los Angeles, CA, sent a chain letter to her college roommate. The next day, she acquired over $3 million.

* Since her arrest, Sally has developed productive relationships with many roommates in prison.

Still don’t believe me? Consider this:

* I’m smarter than you.

By now you must be asking yourself: Are my roommate and I compatible? Are we in touch with each other’s needs? Have we found the ability to communicate? Have we lost the ability to communicate? Where did we see it last? Are we taking each other for granted? Is every time as good as the first?

Since the average freshman roommating lasts longer than many American marriages, it’s surprising that so little advice or self-help is available, certainly nothing like the multi-million-dollar marriage counseling industry in this country.

I am ready to address that need. Here’s a test.

1. When you met his/her family, did his/her father

a. Give you the keys to the Mercedes?
b. Advise you to keep sharp objects hidden?
c. Touch you in your "special place"?
d. Ask your name?

2. When you try to carry on a meaningful conversation, does he/she

a. Listen carefully, then give his/her opinion?
b. Consult an attorney?
c. Borrow your best outfit?
d. Ask your name?

3. Which of the following best characterizes the first words he/she says to you each day?

a. “Good morning.”
b. “Good night.”
c. “This is a stick-up.”
d. “I hate you, you disgusting smelly pervert.”

4. When you’re out together with friends, does he/she

a. Mock your grooming and personal hygiene?
b. Steal your date?
c. Nothing, I don’t have any friends.
d. Serve charming little hors d’oeuvres on matching plates, all of which he/she made him/herself? (Warning: Your roommate may be Martha Stewart. Make no sudden movements. Notify campus security.)

5. When you’re in the shower, does he/she

a. Breathe a sigh relief?
b. Download your econ notes?
c. Lock you out of the room?
d. Make your bed?

If you answered mostly

a. Seek professional help.

b. Try standing naked about a foot apart and staring at each other fifteen minutes a day. This may not help your relationship, but at least you’ll settle the “he/she” question.

c. Think about transferring to another school, perhaps in another state, perhaps under an assumed name.

d. Refresh your dorm room with fresh-cut flowers. Brighten drab wastebaskets and notebook covers with postcard collages. Don’t throw out old nylons! They can be used to make a sturdy noose.

e. You were taking the wrong test. There are no "e" answers on this test. How did you get into college, anyway?

But don’t despair! This roomie relationship can be saved. Here are a few simple steps to dorm-estic bliss:

1. Make a chart of your roommate’s annoying habits, post it prominently, and allot good-conduct stars each day a bad habit is not observed.

2. Don’t be bashful about searching your roomie’s closet, desk, or dresser. It’s those unspoken secrets from the hidden past that prevent healthy communication and mutual respect.

3. Excessive tidiness will only make your roommate more demanding. Week-old pizza, nail clippings, beer bottles, and DNA samples lend character to a floor.

4. Remember, it's not identity theft if you plan to give the credit card back after Spring Break.

5. Read my book, Men Are from Mars, My Roommate Is from Shaker Heights (forthcoming from All-American Press, a division of Götherdsmann-Blickspitz GMBH). If your roommate is still uncooperative, hit him with the book.

Good luck and happy rooming!

NOTE: I found this in a drawer. It was written so long ago, I think most of this year’s freshman class were still in diapers. (The Martha Stewart joke is kind of a giveaway, eh?) What the hell.

Read more!

Fine Dining

A long way from Goliad

I have tried sharing my kitchen with a rat, and it wasn’t nearly so much fun as the new Pixar movie Ratatouille makes it appear. All the time I lived on 105th Street, which I later discovered had been dubbed “Rat Alley” by WNBC-TV, I had furry little roommates. The rats seldom troubled me — with the exception of the one I kicked to death — another story for another day. But the rats were no help when I cooked, and they sometimes scurried over my feet when I was standing at the sink. This was remarkably unpleasant. I wore boots when I washed dishes. The rats refused to be trapped, and despite eating considerable quantities of high-grade poison (I found the crumbs all over the apartment when I moved out), they didn’t die. For all I know, they’re still there, hardy squatters in a renter’s world, real New Yorkers who easily outlast lily-livered transients like me.

This is a somewhat long proviso to an otherwise enthusiastic recommendation of the movie — you remember, I was talking about Ratatouille. (Wasn’t I?) The picture sums up a lot of my philosophy of food, and of France, and of French food. On summer vacations in Royan, Henri Boutrit used to take me to the market, and I’ve never seen a better carnival. Crowds fill the 1950s concrete dome, pushing and shoving and buying and selling a breathtaking array of fresh seafood, fresh vegetables, fresh poultry and meats, fresh bread, and heaps of sausages, cheeses, olives, honey, and jam.

Dr. Boutrit attacked the market like a general at war, with careful strategies and well-honed tactics. Some merchants were to be avoided, others favored. Best-loved of all was Marie, a blue-eyed, bona-fide “Ooh-la-la” charmer who sold exquisite bread: she and Dr. Boutrit engaged in a slightly bawdy repartee that might have drawn paying audiences to any theater. It seemed almost impossible that this wasn’t the whole show, but Dr. Boutrit lugged the spoils of battle back to the house and prepared dazzling meals: boiled langoustines, sardines grilled over brush in the open fireplace, veal chops, Charentais melons and oysters from Oléron, and always, always a green salad at the end of the meal, with a cheese plate and fresh fruit. There was wine, too, even at lunch, offered up with Dr. Boutrit’s cheery refrain, “Ah, bon! Qui veut du rouge?”

Langoustines, sardines, and other delicacies at the Royan market.

I took to New York the lessons of my cher maître. It became anathema to do all my grocery shopping in one store: I had to go to three or four, at least, on my way home from work, because it stood to reason that not all goods would be of equal merit in the same establishment. Even when I dine alone, I tend to eat three or four courses, and to take my meals with wine. And I began, with increasing daring, to cook. With or without rats. And I may say that I make a damned fine ratatouille.

But it wasn’t in France that I learned that food could be special. I learned that in Goliad, my mother’s hometown, as a recent e-mail from my aunt Tisha reminded me. She told me what she’d cook for my birthday, if I weren’t on the other side of the world that day: fried chicken, rice and gravy, yellow-squash casserole, all the favorites of my childhood. I was transported to hot summer mornings at my grandmother’s house, where Bessie, the housekeeper, would tell me stories and quiz me about my girlfriends (whose names she remembered better than I did — I was truly a cad at age seven) while she prepared that precise menu, specially requested in honor of my visit.

Sometime this year, Bessie will mark her seventieth anniversary of working for our family. She claims she’s slowing down, but I don’t see it. She still works a few hours a week for my aunt, and a few hours for my parents, who now live in my grandparents’ house. Not long after my parents moved to Goliad, Bessie came over to the house and fried chicken. To see her back in that kitchen, and filling it with the mingled aromas of grease and chicken and simmering squash, to hear her singing hymns and still quizzing me about girlfriends, was a powerfully emotional experience. I half expected to see my grandmother walk in to check on our progress, though she’s been gone for 18 years, or to hear my grandfather call out from the dining room, though he, too, has long since passed away. Bessie’s cooking was connecting me to my past, but more than that, her cooking made real a kind of continuity. Life goes on. People come and people go, people are born (Bessie has diapered four generations of us) and people die. And the chicken will be fried.

Bessie Pullam and Bill Madison with a platter of Goliad magic

There’s a spiritually similar moment in Ratatouille when a villainous food critic samples the homeliest dish on the menu and recalls, in a flash, why he loves food in the first place. We see him small and thin and alone, a boy in the doorway of his mother’s kitchen. She smiles and serves him lunch. Back in the present, the critic savors his mouthful. His eyes brim with tears, and then he says, “This is what I’ve been missing.” If anybody you cared about ever fed you, you’ll know what he means.

Bessie’s fried chicken means that to me. And Tisha’s fried chicken is nearly as magically potent. (Fried catfish, which she is seen preparing here, is Tisha’s unrivaled specialty.) So I had to wonder whether it was kindness that compelled her to point out that, if I were in Goliad, I’d be eating love.

I had to go out to a Parisian restaurant and eat a three-course meal just to get over the remorse.

(There were no rats in sight: I suspect that, in the wake of Ratatouille, I’m going to have to say that a lot.)

Tisha Robinson prepares poisson-chat pané (fried catfish).

The market in Beynes is about one-eighth the size of the market in Royan, and on Thursdays in August, most of the vendors are on vacation, and those who stick it out may outnumber the customers. But I wandered by yesterday morning, and the organic-produce vendor was selling yellow squash.

Yellow squash is a rarity in this country, although zucchini is found everywhere and it does provide a decent substitute in the old Goliad recipe for squash casserole. Tisha herself has proven this. (Other hard-to-find-here staples of Southern cuisine include corn on the cob, yams, and okra. You have to go to African markets to find the last.) But the organic-produce vendor prides himself on exotic wares, and I snapped up the yellow squash with a greedy sense of purpose.

I went home and fried four pieces of chicken, and baked a yellow-squash casserole, and boiled up some rice. Making good gravy requires a finer hand than mine, so I didn’t even try it: previous attempts have yielded a sort of salty grey wallpaper-paste. But I have studied Bessie long enough that I knew how to cook the rest. The recipes are simple.

Fry the chicken until it is done. Then stop. Allow to cool, then serve.

Boil the squash (and some onion) until it is done. Then stop. Then bake until it is done again. Then stop. Allow to cool, then serve.

How do you know when it’s done? You just do.

Now you can do it yourself.

The organic-produce vendor had fresh tomatoes, too, so I made myself a little salad. I thought of my grandmother, who once heard a song and was enchanted by it, forever repeating the lyric, “Two things in life that money can’t buy: true love and home-grown tomatoes.”

And suddenly I was — well, not home, exactly. My attachments to Goliad and New York and France are so deep, and so conflicting (not only with each other but with every known reality), that I’ve begun to wonder if I’ll ever be at home, anyplace. It is perhaps enough challenge just to be myself, wherever I am, rather than trying to find a place that can be home. I’m still figuring it out. But I do know that when I ate that fried chicken and squash, wherever I was, I was myself. Thanks in no small measure to Tisha Robinson, and Helen Torian, and Bessie Pullam, and Henri Boutrit, and the food they gave me.

And so I was Bill Madison, eating a Goliad meal in the heart of France. And all was right with the world.

Goliad photographs by Robin Barnhill.

Read more!

The Pigeon and the Plant

Scene of the crime

Some years ago, my boss threw a temper tantrum and locked himself in his hotel room during a business trip to Florida. He refused to come out, and since he also refused to answer his telephone or to speak to anybody, or even to listen to the several people shouting blandishments and pleas at him through the door, it took all our cunning and persuasion to talk him down.

At the time, I told myself that this was an isolated incident, uncharacteristic of my boss; I resolutely overlooked many similar outbursts. He did have the decency to feel sorry after the Florida trip, or at least to say he felt sorry, and he sent me a potted plant by way of atonement.

It was an immense spathiphyllum, so big that it dominated its corner of my living-room. It required little light, and could go several days without being watered. This was a good thing, since I traveled a lot, and my roommate thought it was ugly; he made no secret of hoping that neglect would hasten its demise. I'd come home to find its soil dry, its leaves limp. But it would spring back to life after a few minutes under the faucet.

On yet another trip, my boss threw another temper tantrum. I lost patience and started to yell back at him; my job was forfeit as a result.

I started to feel pretty ambivalent about that plant.

One more victim in the Naked City

As I sat there, unemployed, the spathiphyllum began to look sinister. It was a swamp creature. Its leaves were dark, muscular and malignant, its blossoms impertinent. It had never been pretty. Now it was like a monkey with an erection — an angry, brooding, possibly rabid monkey.

I moved it to the bathroom.

I continued to travel a lot, which meant that I continued to neglect the plant for intervals short and long. Over time, the plant shrank, until it was too small for its big ceramic pot, and after a few more years it stopped blossoming, which struck me as botanically improbable, though I freely grant that it knew its nature better than I could. But nothing, not even my roommate, seemed able to kill it outright.

I got a new job, moved first to Brooklyn, then back to Manhattan: the plant never seemed to notice these changes. It moved to a plastic pot on a little shelf under the bathroom window, where it got excellent light yet didn't quite rebound. My new home had rats; I blamed them for everything that went wrong in the building. I was sure that every time I came into the bathroom, they took refuge behind the plant, lurking behind it, using it for some nefarious purpose.

Just in time to mark the twentieth anniversary of my moving to New York, I was laid off from that new job. Being laid off isn't conducive to a positive outlook, and on one of my gloomier days, I reckoned that all my jobs had ended in some kind of disaster: three employers had let me go; another sold his company and left the country without warning. I was production assistant for a Broadway musical that closed after four performances and briefly held a record for losing money. Clearly, there was something about making it in the big city that I just hadn't grasped.

Meanwhile, friends had published novels, given birth, sung operas, directed plays, made movies, earned living wages, built homes and then summer homes; I had nothing but a sick houseplant to show for my troubles. Maybe this was a good time to consider going somewhere else.

I'd never taken a semester abroad while I was in college, and this seemed the right time to remedy that lapse by moving to France. I arranged to put most of my belongings in storage, and I can't say I was disappointed to learn that the warehouse explicitly forbade houseplants. I'd have to get rid of the spathiphyllum.

I didn't even bother to ask whether any friends wanted to adopt it. Other departing neighbors had gotten rid of houseplants by setting them at the foot of a tree at the curb in front of our building, creating a ragtag little garden. And so one morning, the spathiphyllum took its place there, too.

Within an hour, a plump grey pigeon had nestled in the plastic planter, among the leaves of my plant. He seemed happy enough to be there — he didn't budge, even when I came near him. Nothing spooked him, nothing made him leave his new roost. Even allowing for the standards of a New York pigeon, he was unflappable. As it were.

I went on about my business, running errands, packing, cleaning house, coming and going. After a couple of hours had passed, I realized that it was less likely that the pigeon was nesting and more likely that he was ill. I felt sorry, but I could hardly call a vet. Anyway, what's one pigeon less, in a city like New York?

Late that afternoon, the pigeon was still there. He wasn't moving at all now, and his head drooped, resting on the leaves of my plant. I figured he'd succumbed to his illness,and I'd better dispose of him. If he'd eaten some rat poison, and some dog or cat ate him, the consequences would be dire. But as I came nearer, I saw the truth.

His heart had been cut out.

Typically, I was quick to blame the rats — I cursed the carnivorous fiends that gnawed at the poor creature! But then I noticed the precision, the surgical care with which the bird's heart, and only his heart, had been removed. Some human, some passerby, some neighbor, some New Yorker had done the job.

Was the culprit's motivation bloodlust or Santería? Was the plant cursed, or was I? Was somebody trying to tell me something?

For the timing was too tidy to ignore. In 21 years in New York, I'd never found a murdered pigeon on my doorstep. But now, on the eve of my unglorious departure, I did. And not merely on my doorstep, but amid the greasy green leaves of the plant that was born of my inability to cope with my former boss — a botanical testament to a personal failure. Among so many, many personal failures.

As I stared, my civic conscience stopped bothering me, and I forgot about removing the corpse. Nobody noticed the dead bird. Nobody noticed me. The spathiphyllum kept its counsel.

What's one pigeon less? What's one Bill Madison less? New York, and all its inscrutable mysteries, would go on without us.

Read more!