The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (19 page)

My own most regular visit is to an older figure. Guy de Maupassant's presence here seems a bit incongruous, since like so many nineteenth-century writers he was a creature of the Right Bank above all. I might have expected to find him at the cemetery in Montmartre, where he set one of his best stories. “The Graveyard Sisterhood” is a bawdy little anecdote in which the speaker recalls the curious way in which he once acquired a mistress. While visiting the tomb of a former lover he noticed a pretty woman crying over a freshly filled grave. It was natural for him to console her; and when after many months they parted, he made her a suitable present. Sometime later he went back to the cemetery—and saw her weeping over a different but equally new grave. Another man was rushing to her side, and her eyes implored our narrator to keep silent. Which sets him to thinking. She had taken him in, he had never quite realized she was working, and now he wonders if the graveyards might not be full of the crocodile tears of women trawling for customers.

Well, nothing like that has happened on any of the half-dozen times I've gone to see Maupassant, though once another visitor did hand me a flier for a self-published book of essays. For I have never been alone with the author of “La Maison Tellier” and “Boule de Suif.” There are always other people there, at this modest grave planted with roses, not a crowd but enough to make it easy to spot, and many of them leave notes. I read through them one day, a stack of small slips of paper that had been rained upon and then bleached by the sun, notes like the ex-votos at the shrine of a saint, thanking Maupassant for favors conferred—that is, for pleasure given—in French and Italian, Spanish and German and Japanese. English too, of course—though those, I'm sorry to say, are on the order of “Guy, you rock!” Which isn't exactly how I'd put it, and yet it's true enough. Certainly that sentiment fits his best novel,
Bel-Ami,
in which one always expects the hero to be found out, to be caught and exposed and punished, like Stendhal's Julien Sorel before him. But no: Maupassant's cheerful cad goes on cheating everyone until the last page, when he is rewarded with a millionaire's daughter and a wedding at the Madeleine, and the author's effrontery in pulling it all off is every bit as great as his character's.

Most of my reading this year has been in the French nineteenth century—more Maupassant, some Zola, a bit of Gautier. After making her way through the fat brick of
The Count of Monte Cristo,
my twelve-year-old demanded that I read it too, and for a week it made me feel as though I were twelve myself. So then I got busy. I followed the Musketeers out through two thousand pages of sequels to their deaths, and after finishing with Dumas moved on to Hugo; good enough, in
Notre-Dame de Paris,
to make me think about someday trying
Les Misérables.
I do it all in English, alas; I can handle Maigret in the original but not much more, and even that comes dreadfully slow. Still, Simenon is probably better when read slowly—speed ruins his sense of moody rumination.

Once past Simenon and Proust, however, the twentieth century becomes for me an unscratched territory, a land that contains the well-known names of so many unknown volumes that I don't know where to begin. Maybe that's why I took myself out one day to the newish tower blocks of the Bibliothèque nationale, along the river at the city's eastern edge. Not that I was looking for a book: all my needs have been filled by that superb expatriates' institution the American Library, which sits in the seventh in the very shadow of the Tour Eiffel. But the Bibliothèque also runs exhibits, and this spring's lead show is a celebration of the one-hundredth
anniversary of Gallimard, the publisher of Gide and Malraux, Sartre and Sarraute, of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
and the tidy permanence of the Pléiade. There are many exhibits up in Paris at any one time, more than any amateur can possibly see, and the last year has brought an overcrowded Monet blockbuster at the Grand Palais and an entirely thrilling retrospective of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Orsay. Manet is hanging now, and Caillebotte, and Odilon Redon, and yet for me it will be hard to match the fascination of the video clips, dust jackets, and documents that the Bibliothèque has put together.

The interest starts even before you enter, with the realization that the lettering on the library's permanent signage uses the same typeface as most of Gallimard's publicity material. An accident, a string pulled on some committee in the Mitterrand years? Who knows, but it does speak to the publisher's quasi-official stature. It makes the national library itself look like an accessory of the Pléiade. The show opens with a room of photographs, a Murderers' Row of the house's writers: Proust and Camus and Céline, Marguerite Yourcenar and Romain Gary and the firm's newest Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa. There's a vitrine with some famous manuscripts—
Le Deuxième Sexe, Les Faux-Monnayeurs
—and then in the next room a wall displays some of the firm's reader's reports. Many of these are on works first written in English, and some of them are signed by names as distinguished as those on the spines of the books themselves; that for Isak Dinesen's
Out of Africa
is by Raymond Queneau. Meanwhile Ramon Fernandez advises rejecting
Gone With the Wind
—only to be overruled by Gaston Gallimard himself, who winkled it away from another publisher when a dinner party conversation made him realize what a hit it would be. The editors tried out dozens of titles for it—
En plein vent? Aller au vent?
—before settling on
Autant en emporte le vent,
and when the film was released under that name in France the firm made the producers acknowledge its copyright.

Gallimard does many things, kids' books and detective novels and a series of heavily illustrated travel guides, marvels of book production that Knopf publishes in translation; one room shows the mock-up for a multipage foldout that depicts the belts of cultivation along the Nile. There are walls of advertising posters and dust jackets, and bookcases displaying the house's various lines, like the Folio series of paperbacks, their design as unmistakable as a Penguin but printed more crisply and on better paper too. For someone of my own obsessions the most interesting things here are the bits that define Gallimard's long history of publishing Faulkner. It began with a 1931 letter from the Princeton French professor Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, who was then busy translating
A Farewell to Arms.
He gave a brief progress report on the Hemingway and then followed it with two typed pages on his prolific new discovery. Gallimard released
Sanctuary
in 1933 and
As I Lay Dying
the next year, but Faulkner himself didn't get to Paris until 1951. A framed letter here records his thanks for the firm's hospitality in good though stiff French.
“Tout le monde doit bien aimer la France,”
he writes and then adds that in Mississippi there's now someone who loves it just a little bit more.

Tout le monde.
The phrase reminds me of something Jefferson is alleged to have said—that everyone has two countries, his own and France. Would I go that far myself? I don't know, and yet there's one crucial aspect of our national life that I can experience more fully here than now seems possible in America itself. Videocassettes and DVDs have long ago killed off the revival movie houses in which I spent so many grad school hours—have killed them everywhere but in Paris, where on most days the cinemas around the Rue des Écoles give me a choice of half a dozen old American movies. The screens are on the small side, but you still watch in the dark with other people, as you were meant to. Schools in France let out early on Wednesdays, and so that's where my daughter and I are apt to spend the afternoon, sitting in front of
Notorious
or
Stagecoach
or
Top Hat,
sitting at home only and precisely because we are also abroad.

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

 

A
FTER READING AN ARTICLE
on Bosnia's tourism boom, my brother, Eldin, and I decided it was time to face down our past. We reasoned that we were really doing this for our seventy-two-year-old father, Senahid. If he didn't see the country of his birth or his childhood friends soon, he never would. Yet within days I became obsessed with creating a to-do list for our trip: 1) Take a picture of the concentration camp my brother and father survived; 2) visit the cemetery where the karate coach who betrayed us was buried; 3) confront Petra, the neighbor who stole from my mother.

The minute we stepped out of the car in front of our old apartment building, my hands began to sweat. We fled eighteen years ago, one year into the Bosnian war, and had not been back since. My father's friend Truly bought our apartment as a summer home in 2006, the year my mom died of cancer. (We were living in Connecticut by then.) Truly and my father both worked with the city's sports clubs and were close friends for thirty years. “You and your brother should know what your father did for this city and its people,” Truly said when he greeted me. “That's why he stayed alive.”

As we approached the building, I could see Truly's two pretty teenage daughters staring down at us from the third-floor balcony. I was reminded of what it was like to be twelve, shouting to my friends below as I rushed to get to karate practice. It still shocked me to recall that it was my coach who, put in charge of the city's special-police unit, arrived with the army van to cleanse the building of its Muslims. They marched to our door and told my father, “You have an hour to leave or you will be killed.” We left and went to stay with my aunt. My father and brother were picked up a month later and put into a camp. My mother and I eventually made it back to the apartment, where we were all reunited three months later. We were the only Muslim family who didn't flee the building when the war began. But we lived in fear that someone would come back for us.

Inside, the building hadn't changed—the same impossibly high steps, the same brown mailboxes. Only the tenants' names were different. After the war, this side of town came to be populated by Serbs. Bosnians like us were now a minority.

As I walked into the apartment, I headed for my old bedroom. I used to lie on the floor peeping through the tiny holes in the shades that were drawn all day and night so soldiers couldn't see you and spray the windows with bullets.

Coming up to our apartment, I passed Petra, our old neighbor. She was in her late sixties now. When she caught sight of me, she put down her grocery bags and sat on the stairs to smoke a cigarette, hoping to avoid me.

I flashed back to the night she barged into our dining room and told my mother to give her the skirt she was wearing. The next day it was the dining room rug Petra wanted. A week later she invited my mother for coffee, and they sat with their feet resting on the stolen rug. Truly's wife promised my mother that she would never acknowledge Petra. “All summer long I walk by her as if I'm walking by a grave,” she said.

Petra liked to tell the paramilitaries where Muslims were living so they could come and cart them away in meat trucks. Her husband, Obren, worked as a guard in the concentration camp. (It was the same one from which my brother and father were miraculously released, as prisoners were being transferred, hours before CNN arrived to show the world the atrocities.) While Petra requisitioned my mother's things, Obren brought me canned beans and plum jam. He remembered the time my father stood up for him during a tenants' meeting just before the fighting began. Years later, we learned he died of esophageal cancer. His wife has lasted almost as long as a Galápagos tortoise. The monsters always live.

As she approached our floor, her footsteps became halting, her breathing heavy. She fumbled for her key. Her eyes didn't meet mine. “No one has forgotten,” I said. She put her head down. The door opened with a long sigh, then closed. There was silence.

I heard laughter coming from our old living room and joined my friends inside. Truly turned to his daughters and said, “If the two of you were only a few years older, you could marry one of the boys.” They blushed, smiling. “Once they turn eighteen,” I said, to make them less uncomfortable.

Later that night I reached into my pocket for my to-do list and crossed off item No. 3.

FROM
Grantland

 

W
HAT DO YOU WANT
from Tijuana, my friends? You want to meet a girl? I can take you to the Hong Kong Gentlemen's Club. I can get you two-for-one drinks. (Actually, I know a guy:
three
-for-one drinks!) I'll show you a white donkey painted with black zebra stripes. The “Dr. House” Pharmacy and other places just out of reach of your copyrights. You want Che Guevara T-shirts, my friends?
I Ate the Worm
T-shirts? Wet T-shirts? Did I mention the Hong Kong Gentlemen's Club?

Me and my pal Eric, in lousy Spanish: “Do you know where we can find the museum of sports? The, um, place of the famous athletes?”

We do not want sex and drugs from Tijuana. We want to visit the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame.

 

I hate to use an itchy word, but Tijuana is dead. Once, Avenida Revolución—the “Revo,” in the gringo tongue—happily excreted pleasure. At age twenty, I walked its grime-covered sidewalks, dodged honors students from San Diego, and nosed into a bar where a stranger unfurled his hand and said, “Amphetamine?” (Nah, I'd stick with tequila.) But as Eric and I cruise the Revo at a nocturnal hour, we see boarded-up storefronts and hear the Proclaimers playing in empty bars. Even the calls of the touts (“Check this out, amigo”) sound halfhearted, like the fight song when your team trails by three touchdowns. Tijuana, after its severed-head period, has entered a mind-bending phase. It's a gringo viceland without gringos.