The Aix Files
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
In the city of the fountains.
That’s such a Calvino way to start an entry.
In the city of the fountains, through the tiny squares and past the clock tower, we stay in a hotel with pretty printed bedspreads that makes us want to do nothing but sleep for fear that we will never stay in a place like it, will never sleep its real, splayed out, deep-cushioned brand of sleep, again.
In Aix en Provence, we fall through the rabbit hole and find a whole other France. A France in which there is sun and blue sky and in which people are actually kind of nice to us. In which no one seems bothered by our French, and no one hesitates to use it with us as though it were a an actual, practical means of communication and not an ironclad cultural symbol, the barricade between La France and The Onslaught of Mediocrity. In Aix, we need not carry another nation’s baggage on our weary North American shoulders. We are free to chat amongst ourselves.
A woman in a take-out pasta place recommends a travel guide. A sales clerk at a Kodak photo-printing kiosk hands us a city guide and a map.
“Do you mind that it’s in French?” she asks.
“No,” we say. “We don’t mind.”
We have spoken more French in the last 48 hours than we did in four months in Paris.
And maybe it is the sun or the water, the constant sound of it around every corner so that it becomes almost a game to find its source, or the odd cathedral with its six different styles and no-neck statues of saints, or the tiny winding streets, or the big-shuttered windows in pale yellow and blue — seriously, like all the books tell you — or maybe just the people. Like the old Vietnamese man in his tiny shop, who took ten minutes to prepare our order even though the food was cooked and ready under the glass, to wrap the rice in paper and pour sweet orange sauce into a little packet and put fresh cilantro into a bag, to recommend the tofu, even while the line outside stretched around the corner and no one complained. Or maybe because we ate it in a garden surrounded by a high wall under a tree whose green-y, unripe fruit we could not identify.
But neither of us wants to leave.
We miss the train to Avignon because we tarried in the flower market and took too many pictures of the tiger lilies, because we sat too long over espresso and little squares of chocolate in a grass-green-painted coffee shop watching the mechanism of a hot chocolate pot spin its contents — lush, curiously dense — in a lazy circle.
As divine punishment, our only transportation option becomes the spendy TGV. J____, seeing as she’s not insane or Catholic, doesn’t believe in divine punishment, and I hesitate to make uneducated intimations about karma and its workings, but even she agreed that it was hilariously, ridiculously expensive. How expensive? As a rough calculation, the train cost about €2 per minute of travel time. (That’s $3, for those of you playing along at home.) As we say en Anglais, holy shit.
At any rate, literally, we’re here. Here being not Avignon or any other town in France, any other pretty place on Earth. Here, right now, just feels like not-Aix-en-Provence. It just feels cold. But maybe, somewhere tomorrow, there’s sun.
