A Fool's Alphabet (24 page)

‘Reprenez votre billet' warned signs just after the barrier, but it was a point of pride among Parisians to drop them at once, causing drifts of yellow beneath the hurrying feet. Later would come the notice ‘Au delà de cette limite votre billet n'est plus valable', with its implications that seemed to go
beyond transport to something more sinister. The new carriages gave a gratifying pneumatic belch as the doors closed, then a jerk which could send unwary tourists flying down the carriage. Young men always raised the lever on the door while the train was still moving, taking advantage of the power-assisted mechanism to be on the platform before the train had stopped. Even on the cattle trucks in the dingiest, most strangely named stations, dark and deserted at unfashionable times of day, the trains offered first-class carriages in a demonstration of liberté if not égalité. In the rush hours, better named
heures d'affluence
, there was also fraternité: big men embraced smaller people of either sex who trembled on the threshold as the doors began to close; they wrapped their arms around them and brought them into the pack of coats and jammed bodies.

But much more than the street-wisdom of the Métro user, and almost as much as the names of the places, it was the smell that intoxicated him. From the moment he first inhaled it (Argentine,
direction
Château de Vincennes) he knew it would summon this infernal world to him with all its grief and history at the merest sniff. It was a mystery. It was not food or cleaning fluid, metal, or anything identifiably mechanical; nor did it vary from station to station or with the different rolling stock. There was something of rubber in it, perhaps, of soot . . . he couldn't say.

He wrote to a man whose name he found in a book about the Métro to ask him what he thought. He did not know. ‘However,' he replied, ‘I can tell you that an attempt was made just before the Second World War to deodorise the station of Châtelet-les Halles using a lemon-scented disinfectant. An earlier attempt was made at Père Lachaise in 1907, but since the practice did not become widespread, we have to assume that this was not a success either.'

A vegetable market and a cemetery . . . perhaps these two stations had special reasons for smelling, Pietro thought. He was glad in any event that the scheme had not worked. The smell was inimitable. He loved it, and could
not be indifferent to any people for whom it must have brought powerful messages of nostalgia.

‘You can't be serious!' said Harry when he telephoned him in London. ‘You go to the most beautiful city with the most beautiful women in Europe, and you spend the whole time in the underground railway!'

It was the sort of thing that sometimes made him despair of Pietro.

‘Not the whole time,' said Pietro. ‘I went up in a plane too.'

He went to photograph a director of the Ariane space project. He lived in Neuilly, just west of Paris, and welcomed Pietro with a firm handshake and the clear-eyed look of a man to whom the expression ‘hangover' would be unfamiliar. With his sandy hair and open manner, he seemed a little American.

They talked for some time about the project so that Pietro could have an idea what his subject did and what the whole story was about. He had several other people he was supposed to photograph as well, but the magazine had told him that this was the man to give him the background.

Pietro's father had given him a question to ask, though it wasn't one Pietro felt he could introduce straight away into the conversation. His father, still involved with a personal archaeology of English, wanted to know whether Ariane would use the American term ‘astronaut' or the Russian, ‘cosmonaut'. The first, he explained to Pietro, would signify from its root ‘star sailor', the second ‘world sailor', though admittedly the word ‘cosmos' now covered a greater space than the Greeks had first intended. So would they have star sailors or world sailors? To Raymond Russell, and perhaps two or three other people in the world, this was the principal question about the project.

Pietro asked about finance and the perils of manned flight, firing the camera as he did so. He liked to find an angle that brought out the structure of a face and was prepared to spend
hours doing so if the assignment permitted; with some newspapers it was just a question of making sure the pictures were light enough and getting the film back on time.

He hadn't thought much about space flight before. He had a vague picture of a capsule full of baffling instruments, crackling messages from mission control, and tumbling, weightless orbit. It was a job for the brain dead, he assumed, people with zero anxiety levels who could act as efficiently and inhumanly in the unnatural circumstances as a trained ape.

The pictures didn't seem to go well. The director had a bland face which Pietro found hard to set up and frame in an interesting way. He felt a lack of mutual sympathy. Each was professional and polite, but they seemed to be at cross-purposes.

Pietro said, ‘I suppose you couldn't let me go up and take some pictures from the air? Maybe if we could get a plane going fast enough I could give some impression of what the earth looks like as you leave it.'

It took a week to arrange with the public relations people, but the director was not only passionate about publicising his project, he felt Pietro hadn't understood much about flight. The pictures he would take from a plane would have no relevance to the restricted view of an astronaut travelling at speed, but if he were to go high enough he might get some idea of the dimensions of the earth's atmosphere and of the sights beyond it.

They drove to a French air force base and Pietro was given a day's instruction in safety. He began to wonder what he had taken on and felt twinges of panic. The pilot laughingly assured him that they wouldn't be taking a civilian foreign photographer on anything dangerous; on the contrary, they were merely being extra cautious. Pietro felt he had hardly room for manœuvre when they set off. With oxygen and parachutes as well as his camera equipment, he felt it was going to be difficult to swivel around enough to take good pictures. The plane was a training version of a supersonic
fighter, underpowered and roomy, with a cockpit full of computerised double-fail-safe lights and circuitry. Pietro felt the seat kick into the small of his back as the pilot, who spoke to him in English through his earpiece, opened the throttle on the runway.

Above the circular tracery of Paris he began to feel calmer, and as they headed west for Brittany and the sea there was a sense of creeping exhilaration. Pietro fitted his lenses and talked to the pilot. It was somehow reassuring to be so close and to be able to see exactly what he was doing. When Pietro gave the word, they went into a steep climb, the jet engines driving them up through the thinning air. Sickly, Pietro fired the camera at the receding earth.

For an hour they flew and Pietro wound in film after film. They reached heights he didn't think possible in a small aeroplane, where he could see the curvature of the earth. When they landed Pietro shook the pilot's hand and embraced him. He felt they had done something extraordinary together. The pilot smiled and winked at him without giving the impression that he had been much excited.

Pietro wound up his business in Paris and returned to London. He took the films to his usual darkroom in Waterloo where they didn't mind his supervising the development and printing. The images that emerged, as if by some slow alchemy, were alarming. The world seemed turned on its head, dislocated. Then, in later films, the shapes were more ordered and there was a better perspective. The different bands of colour that shot round the rim of the pictures made the earth look bizarre, like Saturn with its rings.

FROM WATSONVILLE HE
drove south and reached Los Angeles in the evening. The plan had been to drive through the whole of central America to Panama City. He saw no reason why he should not stick to it.

He pulled off the Pacific Coast Highway at the petrol station at the foot of Sunset Boulevard. He got out of the car and walked stiffly around the forecourt. Just up the road was a sign that said ‘Castellammare'.

He turned the name over in his head. Castellammare. As he paid for the petrol he asked the attendant what it meant. ‘Castellammare Drive,' he said. ‘It's the name of a street.'

The weather was soft and warm, a perpetual spring. Across the highway the Pacific lay sluggishly against the coast. Someone had done a good job of naming it. He drove onwards, his exhausted vision beginning to blur. He was on the Santa Monica Fwy, according to the overhead signs. Right Lane MUST Turn Right. His head ached as he sank his foot once more on the accelerator. The freeway and the city behind it took on a fuzzy, unreal look. Then he saw things with sudden clarity. The white rivets that held each white letter on the green-backed sign: Sepulveda Blvd. Sepulveda, Sepulveda. Right Lane MUST Turn Right.

In San Francisco he had found difficulty in sleeping and once, when he had smoked too much marijuana, he had experienced a feeling of dislocation. A doctor had prescribed some tranquillisers and he had thought little more about it. He was starting to lose a sense of his own identity.

In the heat of the Mexican nights he smoked nothing and declined the magic mushrooms people offered him. He drank beer and looked at the stars. Towards midnight he would swallow one of the yellow pills and go inside to sleep.

He rose early in the morning so he could drive a hundred miles or so before it grew too hot. The car, an old Ford they had bought second-hand, rattled down the highway at a steady 70 m.p.h., only overheating in the towns. It took him two days to reach Mexico City. He felt sick and took to his bed in the hotel with a bottle of Immodium. He stayed for three days but felt no better. When he went for a walk his legs felt weak. He paid the bill and drove fast back towards the coast, hoping a loss of altitude would help. He wondered what she was doing. Perhaps she was listening to the same record back in the hills of Vermont. He thought of her driving down to the lake to swim and he imagined the taciturn Steve nodding as he slipped his arm round her shoulders. He didn't stop driving.

Somewhere down near the coast, past Oaxaca with its flower-filled courtyards glimpsed through stone arches, he began to feel lonely. The poor adobe houses, the infrequent towns and coarse landscape beneath the mountains no longer seemed to be full of opportunity or surprise. He wanted to talk to someone, to be called by his name.

That night he awoke in a sweat, thinking he was back in New York. He sat upright in bed, trembling, and it took him some time to shake off the dream. He walked round the hotel room, touching the furniture, the white cotton curtains, the slatted shutters, in an effort to reassure himself of his physical whereabouts. He poured a warm beer and spent some time staring at the label on the bottle. Corona Extra La Cerveza Mas Fina. There was some golden heraldic animal to the left of the blue lettering. He couldn't stop his hand from shaking.

There was another full day's driving, and on the morning of the third day the border with Guatemala came as a relief. By this time he had it in his head to keep on driving, as far
as he could go. The immigration officer, more accurately a soldier with a rifle slung round his neck, asked him where he was from. The soldier had never heard of London and looked at him with blank eyes. It took an hour of paperwork before he was convinced that he was not importing the vehicle. He had been told that Lake Atitlan was a popular destination for American tourists and pointed the car in the direction of Guatemala City where he would rejoin the Pan-American highway. Quite early he took a wrong turning and found himself climbing. It had begun to rain. The burned brown of the hillsides was relieved in places by pale patches of planted maize; in the valleys the ground was pitted from the harshness of the summer drought. The Ford began to wheeze as he climbed. Remembering what he had been told about the continuing guerrilla war in the Indian villages of the north, he began to feel uneasy. He didn't really know where he was; he had crossed the border on the southern coast, it was true, but even there the presence of the military was inescapable. Every mile or so were road signs, saying ‘Alto', Stop, relics of checkpoints from troubled days. They were the most successful army in Central America: critics of successive governments had been wiped out either in loud massacres and shrieking torture or in the silent way that gave birth to the soft-footed term,
los desaparecidos
.

The Ford was starting to make odd metallic noises, yet its temperature showed barely above normal. Finally, on a hillside bend, it made a loud grinding sound and the engine gave out. He pulled the freewheeling car over to the side of the road and clambered out into the rain. He lifted the bonnet but didn't know what he was looking for. The points were dry, the radiator was sealed. The usual amateur checks yielded nothing. He assumed the oil pump or big end had given up.

He walked for five miles with his suitcase. The landscape began to take on a surreal quality under the shifting curtains of rain. He came at last to a village where he sat down under the leaky awning of a roadside café. The first thing he had to do was to change as much money as he could afford. He
showed his only hundred-dollar bill to a thin, yellow-skinned waiter who smiled and took him by the arm. They went into the café and downstairs to a small, airless room that smelt of frying and rank sweat. A fat woman drinking coffee took the bill and, after a rapid exchange with the still grinning waiter, handed him 140 Guatemalan quetzales.

In a mixture of Italian, Spanish, simplified English and creative gesturing, he extracted from the waiter the news that he could get something called a
camioneta
to a place named Quezaltenango, which was in the mountains, on the side of a lake. The waiter spoke fondly of it, but he, confused by the similarity between the currency and the name of the place, thought for some time he was asking him for more money. He suddenly thought of his father. If he ever got to this place he would send him a postcard for his old army friend who hadn't found a ‘Q' in Yorkshire.