Paris by train
Destination: Paris, July 2020
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Transport: Three trains each way (Euskotren from Amara Donostia - Hendaye; TGV from Hendaye - Gare de Montparnasse Paris; Paris Métro from Montparnasse Bienvenüe - Kléber)
Covid protection: Assortment of FFP2 and cloth masks; melon-scented hand sanitiser from the pharmacy by the Gare de Hendaye
Residence: Family flat
Cast: Me, mainly
Token garments: shorts, sunglasses, and converse-style athlétiques
Reading: Henry James, Daisy Miller; Edith Wharton, Roman Fever; E.J. Koh, The Language of Others; Kate Quinn, The Huntress; Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults; Edith Wharton, Summer
Listening: Tango music, back episodes of the Blindboy podcast
Eating: Blueberry scone, galettes, 1 ‘unicorn’ crêpe saved for later
Going
I am sweetening my punishment. The UK has imposed a two-week quarantine on travellers coming from Spain, so I decide to move my train ticket forward and spend a week in Paris. From there, I’ll be taking the Eurostar to London where my family is. The beta variant has arrived in France but is not yet provoking the UK to make sanctions, so I get away with one week holiday, one week house-arrest. As I’m exploiting the protocol to go from my airy Spanish town to a big French city where the potential for contagion is higher, I bargain with Covid, promising that if I do everything I can to protect myself, its part of the deal is to stay away from me.
Just the drag of my wheelie suitcase on the warm tarmac carries me away. The suitcase, the accompanying urge to go, feels like an extension of my arm. Isn’t it morbidly romantic to be travelling by rail in a pandemic? I would always choose this mode over flying, and this year, it’s just as cheap. In the past month I’ve been drawn to stories like Daisy Miller and Roman Fever, where nineteenth-century Americans tryst at the Roman Coliseum, that former nest of tuberculosis, and catch their deaths. I think I’ve been unconsciously trying to prepare for the transcontinental journey from Spain to London; trying to safeguard myself from the worst by contemplating it beforehand. Whatever happens, I won’t end up like Daisy. If I’m unlucky, it will be in a different way from her.
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Crossing the border is as easy as stepping outside of Hendaia/Hendaye train station. I’m tempted to do it again, just to prove I can. Instead, I wait for my TGV train in the outside terrace of a hotel. It’s so nice not having to wear a mask outside, as the current Spanish law dictates. The mask changes gender as you go from Spain to France - la mascarilla, le masque - as do the expectations for wearing it.
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On the train to Paris, laissez-faire attitudes to mask-wearing are less comfortable. I see as many baroque variations for cheating on the mask rule as there are people: around the chin; covering the mouth but not the nose; the nose but not the mouth; dangling from the ear like a telephone receiver. In fact, the only other person wearing it correctly is a Spanish passenger. We send each other eye-smiles of solidarity. When I get out of here, I’m going to have to start counting the days – tomorrow will be one of five. There are no vaccines yet, nor are home Covid tests readily available. Still, though the people might be vessels of disease, I like looking at them, at the scenery too - the tall skinny pines, the sandstone stations and white slope-roofed cottages. It looks unchanged - a time capsule from long before the coronavirus was even a twinkle in a pangolin’s eye. It gives me a feeling of safety. Five hours later, the sweet, thick dust smell of the Paris métro is familiar, even through the mask.
Paris in July
I stay in my mother’s boyfriend’s apartment, a posh, homely place his parents bought in the 1970s and we now use for business and holidays. During my PhD years, I would stay here while I did research. It’s just me here now, but I don’t mind. I have about three times the space of my little studio. I can work in the mornings, and in the afternoons, do all the things that make me tiresome company, such as looking in every shop window or walking from the 16th arrondissement to the 9th, to find an exhibition on the heart at the Musée de la vie romantique. There are ivy-shaped antique hearts and hearts with the texture of fishing nets, but for me the most potent will always be the medieval, which is narrow as an ice-cream cone with a point like a dagger. I like this slender heart, because it’s elegant and portable. No-one would have any excuse for leaving it behind. In my notebook I’ve sketched the museum garden, a girl resting her head on the table, her books pushed aside. This could be me after spending an hour on the Eurostar helpline, when they cancel my train to London. There’s not enough demand for this service and they want to pile us all in together on some distant, 6am train.
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Paris is the nicest version of my mind, which can be doubtful, but here is open to wonders. I’ll venture to say that no-one has seen it as it was in July 2020, with the improvised street terrasses and the astonishing lack of tourists. At that moment, pandemic fears had been temporarily contained and Parisians were out enjoying life. As I’m probably the only tourist, the unthinkable is possible, such as a table right by Shakespeare and Company bookshop, in front of Notre Dame. Though fish and chips are fashionable, appearing on every menu, I, the tourist, eat galettes, taking note of a crêpe I want to save for a wintrier time. It is called the licorne (unicorn) and it is full of chocolate, chestnut cream and pear sorbet. One of my travel superstitions is that I always need to leave something undone, so there’ll be a reason to return.
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This year, Parisiennes are wearing flags of printed silk, but as I’m walking everywhere, I need to plan my outfit from my athlétiques up. I really do look like a tourist, an American one, I think, with my shorts and ponytail and constant looking around. Men approach with ‘tu n’est pas une Parisienne, tu n’est pas une Parisienne.’ If I were single, this would be the one year when looking like an American tourist would pay off. It’s nice to be alone in Paris and in a relationship at the same time, not to be thinking of love in this city that’s set up for it. I have never felt so free or so safe. Whenever anyone approaches me, I can remind him of mon petit ami, the distance de securité, the visite to mes parents très vieux. One upside of the pandemic, is that it’s easier to fend off unwanted attention; the upside of trainers is that you can get away faster.
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Paris in July is full of wildernesses, long grass, wheat fields and hollyhocks allowed to grow tall. It has been four months since March, when coronavirus turned our lives upside down and confined us to our homes. In the grand scheme of things, this will turn out to have been a relatively short period of abnormality. But in July 2020, I don’t know this - this is the most I have been kept away from the world and there’s the fear that everything could be taken away again, that nothing should be taken for granted. Especially this – a full moon and tango dancing at the Musée d’Orsay, which by night looks like it’s old self, a train station by the Seine. I tell myself I’ll just sit here, listen and watch for a few minutes. When it comes to music, I’m either indifferent or overwhelmed. Certain tunes are irresistible and unbearable at the same time, as though my body can’t contain them. When I was little, my parents had an arm-length list of all the songs that would make me cry. The tango songs that emerge from the portable speakers would make it onto the list. Just when I think I’m going to lose it, someone invites me to dance.
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I know this scene is something I want to be part of before I die, though I’m not ready to catch Covid and expire now or kill my parents who I will be seeing in two days. I now see that this push-pull dynamic - I want to, I don’t, I want to, I don’t - is built into the structure of tango, which is an edgy, game-playing sort of dance. I do a quick risk assessment and decide it’s probably okay. Tango is not clingy; my partner is six foot five and I come up to about his belly button. I don’t remember much of the lesson and don’t elaborate on it in my diary. I only note down footwork, a charge between my ankles, the movements becoming smaller and smaller, erasing the space. Half an hour later, I’ve had about as much emotion as I can take. A wind has kicked up from the Seine and I’m in a mood to bound off with it. I know that someday I want to go back and learn more, but life has distracted me and I haven’t found the time.
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On my last day, I take another gamble and go to the cinema. They are playing a 60s Italian new wave film I’ll likely never again get to see. I think about the lengths the archivists have taken to restore it and how someone ought to watch it for their sake, if nothing else. The same toss of the dice – you only live once; this could be the locus of contagion. Daring wins, I wear my mask, sit far from everyone and settle under a constellation of light bulbs. What I remember most, is black and white, cycling to the beach, laughter captured close-up and in slow motion, as though it's the most important thing in the world.
La rentrée
A month later, on the way back from London, I stop again in Paris and everything has changed. There are neat, flamed-coloured flowers in the public squares, marking the transition from summer to autumn - what is officially called la rentrée, meaning the return to the city after summer vacation. Whole zones of the city are masked and stress levels are high. I have only a night here and make it my mission to find the blueberry scone I liked and nothing else. It is not the city of four weeks ago, and dashing around seems irresponsible.
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The next day. I take what I nickname the rentréen from Gare du Montparnasse to Hendaye. There’s a bustling back-to-school feeling, the carriage stuffed with laptops, books and enormous duffel bags, even though we’re travelling away from Paris and towards a looser, beachier place. I recall the last line in The Lying Life of Adults, the Ferrante novel I read over the summer: “On the train we promised each other to become adults as no one ever had before.” This fits my mood, as I leave behind two big cities, London and Paris and make my routine home a seaside town. It seems the opposite of what adults have done for decades.
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