The Best Women's Travel Writing (3 page)

MOLLY BEER

Bridge on the Border

A father-daughter trip to nowhere and everywhere.

O
n Christmas Eve day, I stood with my father on the bridge over the Rio Paz. It was no-man's land—a gap between two nations—but children swam in the glittering brown river, and birds flitted back and forth, from El Salvador, to Guatemala, back again. We were nowhere and everywhere.

Actually, my whole family was visiting, my parents and my two younger siblings, both still in college, and my best friend. I had been finagled into hosting the holidays.

“I'm picturing a quaint little white church,” my mother had imagined aloud. “For midnight Mass?”

My mother never goes to Mass, midnight or otherwise, and she had never been to El Salvador. I tried to stifle my exasperation. What was white was the wall outside my window: two stories tall and trimmed in razor wire. She might as well have been asking for a chance to dance around a ten-gallon sombrero.

Exhausted merely by the idea of their visit, I had decided to resolve the problem of what to do with my flock in El Salvador-of-all-places by whisking them out of the country as quickly as I could. Maybe it was a cop-out, but at least pretty, touristy Antigua with all its quintessential bougainvillea and
tejas
roofs might have something that could pass for a quaint little white church.

This is why, on Christmas Eve, my family saw most of what they would of El Salvador—volcanoes, burning cane fields, tin-roofed shanties, pickups buckling under loads of standing passengers—from the surreal vantage point of an overly air-conditioned first class bus, while a stewardess offered them juice boxes and potato chips.

When the impasse came, we were halfway between San Salvador and Guatemala City, at the Las Chinamas border, which straddles the Rio Paz. El Salvador and Guatemala were working to expedite crossings, so we went straight to the Guatemala station, where the stewardess on the bus recited the strict no-wait policy—rumor had it there was nothing so punctual in Central America as a bus leaving you behind.

I suppose it was an oversight—especially with all the time we spent being cut in front of in line—not to notice I had no entrance stamp in my passport from the last time I'd crossed into El Salvador. According to the stamps, I had either stood on that bridge between the countries for three weeks, or I had been in El Salvador illegally.

This border officer was more thorough. To prove this, he flipped through my battered passport page by page.

When I just stood there looking at him, waiting for him to tell me what to do, he turned my pages a second time.

Eventually I would resort to the old standard: I began to cry, loudly, sniffling.

At last, if only to get rid of me, the border patrol officer sent me back across to the Salvadoran side to see someone called El Delegado. I turned off the taps, snatched my offending passport, and rushed out the door.

I planned to cross back alone, to hurry, but my father volunteered to accompany me. Granted, my father had been to Central America before, and under more frightening circumstances than these, but he wasn't the most obvious ally. He didn't speak Spanish, and although my father is a farmer and accordingly strong, he is slim and not very tall (in those days I was frequently guilty of making off with his blue jeans). He is neither imposing nor forceful, not the way that my implacable mother can be. After months handling problems like this one by myself, however, I found I was relieved to have my father beside me. I batted away tears that I pretended were still related to the face-off in the station behind us while my father hailed a
torito
, or tricycle taxi. As we zoomed down the swoop of pitted road across the bridge over the river that was the border, the rest of my family, their crisp passports in order, returned to the bus to wait for us or the bus's departure, whichever came first.

“Thirty minutes,” the bus stewardess had warned. And thirty minutes were well up already.

Seventeen years had passed since my father was briefly an observer in Central America, during the wars. It was the only time he'd ever been in a country that wasn't directly adjacent to our own. He'd met with grassroots organizers working to improve the quality of life for the poor through means other than violence. He visited cooperatives and met with economists and government officials. I know from my father's Kodak slides that they visited clinics and small businesses and shantytowns full of war refugees.

I was in first grade, but I remember my father's absence. Or, rather, I remember my mother spinning that fascinating globe with its bumps for mountains and so much blue. I spotted the Great Lakes where I knew my home was and put my finger there. Then my mother pointed out that thin, multi-colored strip of land.

“Here,” she said. “In El Salvador.” Or: “In Honduras.” Or: “In Nicaragua.”

I put my other finger on that skinny place where my father was and stretched to touch my thumbs together.

I somehow knew to ask: “Is that one safe?”

I could not have known at six what “safe” meant in the context of those places in that time. I still don't know.

“Here,” my mother told me because I was the oldest and the only one she could tell. She was still reeling from a phone call, her eyes not quite on me but thinking, remembering my father's crackling words in her ears. “He is right here. El Salvador. And everything is okay.”

Her pointer finger covered that whole country.

Working backwards, I can remember my father's preparations for the trip. I can hear him repeating awkwardly after overly loud voices on the cassette player. Surely it was standard stuff:

“¿
Dondé esta el mercado
?”

“
La cuenta
,
por favor
.”

There was a vent in the kitchen ceiling that allowed the heat from the woodstove, and with it sounds of the house below, to rise up into my bedroom. I often went to sleep to the sound of my father singing at the sink, but the Spanish-on-tape was different. I must have gone down to investigate because I can see him washing dishes in felt bootliners, long underwear showing through the frays in his grease-streaked dungarees. I see him concentrating on his tape. In the memory, he does not turn around. He doesn't know that I am there imagining, as he is, another world.

As my father and I approached the Salvadoran immigration station I began rehearsing my own Spanish words, bringing vocabulary forward in my mind. Slang words were the most important:
puchica
,
va
,
que paja
. Slang was the next best thing to knowing somebody's cousin. I didn't expect to know any of the right cousins that day.

“¿
El Delegado
?” I asked an armed man in uniform.

He gestured with the gun.

“
Allá
.”

I turned to face a group of men in combat boots and bulletproof vests who stared back at me. I took a deep breath and charged forward, wondering bleakly whether my father was picking up the low hissing sound one of them was making at me.

“
Estoy buscando El Delegado
,” I announced to the group. The man who stepped forward had a thick mustache and his eyes glittered at me with what I hoped was just amusement.

“¿
En que puedo servirle
?” the official asked in a voice that suggested he did not serve anyone for free.

“
Señor
,” I began, glancing at our armed-and-armored audience. I touched my almost-blond hair. Then I let loose the story in one much interrupted garble of unconjugated Spanish. My family. Of the U.S.—where in the U.S.?—Nueva York. They sit on the bus. There is exit stamp from Guatemala and no entrance to El Salvador—same place, same immigration, one stamp and not the other—when I go for a trip to Tikal—Yes, pretty ruins. I like Central America very much—I am a teacher—today I take my family to show Guatemala—For truth? I be illegal in the country? I must to spend Christmas in handcuffs?

I smiled up at El Delegado, and he beamed before his subordinates, drawing out the show with great flourishes. My father, eager to please, nodded and grinned as if he too understood the joke. Which, of course, was me.

At last El Delegado finished toying with us and pointed out the cashier's office where we paid a ten-dollar fine. With receipt in hand, my father and I set off on foot for Guatemala (the
toritos
go downhill only), waving goodbye to El Delegado's posse as they shouted their good wishes for our travels.

After our little dance with this border policeman, the urgency of our project fizzled out. No doubt, the bus had left or would leave soon, but my father and I strolled across the bridge and then stopped to look over the rail. Below us, slow brown water flowed. The air was warm and smelled like urine baking on the concrete, like overripe fruit, like dust and diesel, like
pupusas
frying in the distance under some blue plastic tarp roof by one of the two immigration stations. There were children playing in the river. From the looks of it they were supposed to be sifting sand from stones through screens but had abandoned their work, along with their clothing, on the rocky shore. Their voices chimed upward, mixed with the sounds of water splashing.

On that bridge over the Rio Paz, the place that my little-girl finger once covered came alive, my father's Kodak slides turned 3-D, green and vivid and ripe-smelling all around us. Even the Spanish language words on tape had turned silvery and sensible. Suddenly, hitchhiking to Guatemala City sounded fun. We'd ride in the back of a pickup truck, our faces to the wind, just my dad and me. We could do anything.

Eventually, my father and I would hike up the hill to the Guatemalan border station. I would kick rocks and my father would whistle. We would cross into Guatemala, my passport properly stamped, and a Christmas miracle would be awaiting us with KING QUALITY BUS emblazoned across its side and my mother standing in its open doorway, one foot on the ground and one on the step. Later that night, my mother would hear the Christmas Eve service in a yellow church, which was close enough, and see
santeros
parade through the street. Then Guatemala would set her straight with an all-night, tooth-rattling fireworks extravaganza.

But in that moment, resting above the Rio Paz, I was leading my father in his own footsteps, bridging a farm in New York and a country too tiny to see clearly on a globe, my father's past and my present, like a not-so-little girl connecting dots. But it was really the stillness that mattered, not the disastrous history or the potential disasters ahead, not where we were from or where we were going, but where we were, right at that moment.

Molly Beer is a terrible traveler. She reads books about Africa while camping in Tibet, cooks Italian food in her Mexican kitchen, or writes obsessively about El Salvador while living on a rooftop in Ecuador. Worse still, she can't pack, she suffers from motion sickness, she is terrified of volcanoes, and she once (three days into the Aldo Leopold wilderness) tore up the map. If she couldn't write her way to the sense of things, she would probably just stay home. Currently an Olive O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University, Molly Beer's most recent travel writing appears in
Vela, Salon, Guernica, Perceptive Travel,
and
Glimpse,
where she was a 2010 Correspondent. She is also the co-author of
Singing Out,
published in 2010.

MARCIA D
e
SANCTIS

Twenty Years and Counting

On the things we set in motion.

S
ince 1784, Le Grand Véfour has occupied the northwest corner of the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris. The restaurant seems forever married to the phrase “venerable institution,” because if only for the roster of French luminaries—from Napoleon to Victor Hugo to Jean-Paul Sartre—who have warmed its velvet banquettes over the years. And then there's me. One fall afternoon twenty years ago, I had my wedding dinner there.

Just weeks later, a young Savoyard chef named Guy Martin was plucked from the Hotel Château de Divonne in the tiny Lake Geneva spa town of Divonne-les-Bains to lead Le Grand Véfour into the twenty-first century. I had never met Guy Martin, but this year, at both of our two-decade marks, I wondered if there might be parallels between the life of a restaurant and the course of a marriage. So I returned to Le Grand Véfour to raise a glass to history—France's, the restaurant's, and my own.

I first ate at Le Grand Véfour in the summer of 1983 with a sporty count named Nicolas who squired me around Paris in a Fiat Spider, but whose diminished circumstances became obvious when the bill arrived. He was a couple hundred francs short. But what did I care who paid the check? Champagne was coursing through our veins, and the restaurant's gilded opulence gave us the sensation that we were tucked inside a fancy chocolate box. Despite its age, Le Grand Véfour had the order and polish of something new and, for me, uncharted. Glass panels lined the dining room, along with portraits of fleshy, bare-breasted goddesses bearing peaches or colored ices—paintings 200 years old, but with hues and sentiments as fresh as that July morning. All around me, the thrill of seduction mingled with the tranquility of permanence.

The scent of tarragon wafted up from my lamb chops, and cassis ice cream added another layer of pleasure, which— along with Nicolas's hand intermittently grazing my thigh under the table—heightened the anticipation in all my senses. The bubbly, his lips on my bare shoulder, a warm summer night—Le Grand Véfour was promise itself and the pure essence of Paris. I never forgot it.

Eight years later I was back, living in Paris and working as a journalist, traveling for stories in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When I got engaged to Mark, an American sculptor, there seemed no question that we would forego the big to-do stateside and get married in the city we now called home. He had bought my engagement ring—a gorgeous and well-worn platinum, diamond, and sapphire band—at an upscale pawnshop on the rue de Turenne for 1,200 francs, or about $200 at the time. Our rented apartment had a fancy Marais address, but I'd spent the better part of the previous year steaming off the stained brown wallpaper that covered every inch of the place, substituting the bare light bulbs on the ceiling with fixtures from the market at Clignancourt, and hiding the prewar linoleum under carpets I bought at souks from Istanbul to Fez.

In France, no one cared where we had gone to college or what our fathers did back home. We worked hard, scraped by, consorted with journalists and artists, and weren't on any regular family dole that propped up our lifestyle. Still, I was the youngest of four unmarried daughters, so my parents were eager to foot the bill for whatever I chose for the fifty people we planned to invite—family, a few good friends from the States and, mostly, those who comprised our life in France.

I had already lived in Paris long enough to dress the part, but some other things remained difficult for a young American woman. Like finding a wedding venue. I aimed high, but Paris was shutting me out. I inquired at what seemed like the city's entire varsity restaurant line-up: L'Orangerie and l'Amboiserie, Taillevent and Maison Blanche. In each dining room, the gatekeeper shook his head, topped it off with a puckered expression of Gallic scorn, and sent me packing. They seemed to be telling me what I suspected: we had no business getting married in such a place. Yankee, go home.

I hadn't dared approach Le Grand Véfour; it was considered a sanctum, impenetrable and holy, despite a perceived decline I'd read about following the recent death of its chef of thirty-six years. But one day, while getting a haircut at a salon in the Galerie Vivienne, I realized I was a stone's throw from the restaurant.

“Your hair looks very sad,” my coiffeuse, Monique, told me flatly, referring to my brunette locks.

“Really?” I asked. Two hours later I walked out a blonde—and not a classy-looking one.

Maybe it was the hair that made me lose my guile, because something marched me straight over to Le Grand Véfour. I stopped to read the placard in memory of Colette, who had lived upstairs and who, at the end of her life, was carried down each day for lunch at her lavish personal canteen. I turned the corner on the rue de Beaujolais and walked inside, where I was greeted by an imposing woman with a spray of silk ruffles at her neck.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm getting married on September 7th at the
mairie
of the 3rd arrondissement, and afterwards, I would like to have my dinner here.”

To my astonishment, her face lit up.

“I'm Madame Ruggieri,” she said. “Congratulations. We would be delighted to host your celebration.”

When our wedding party arrived at Le Grand Véfour on an unusually sultry Saturday in September, waiters greeted us beneath the colonnade with flutes of pink Champagne on silver trays. At the time, the wine giant Taittinger owned the restaurant, and it had been closed for a month—officially, this was the final day of its summer hiatus, during which it had been buffed, shined, and spruced up. Tomorrow it would open to the public again, but today it was ours. With the sun pouring in and reflecting off its many mirrors, the room shimmered. A solo cellist played a Bach suite as we trickled inside.

Above the tables in Le Grand Véfour are small plaques in memoriam to those who occupied them. Mark and I sat side by side on Napoleon and Josephine's banquette. Our lamb medallions were drizzled with basil sauce this time, and our wedding cake was topped with pulled sugar roses. The freesia and lilies that Madame Ruggieri and I had chosen for the tables were almost unnecessary, upstaged by the room itself.

“I'm your wife,” I whispered to Mark at some point during dinner. He reached around me on the banquette, grasped my hip and pulled me toward him, sensing my incredulity at the pronouncement. I wasn't thinking about how long, or if, we'd last. I simply needed to name what I had become, as if saying the word meant I had simultaneously transformed into a more true and worthy soul. But I didn't feel the least bit changed. Instead, I sensed I had boarded the finest and sturdiest of ships but was terrified of water, and furthermore, it was too late for me to disembark. Now, my destiny was choosing me.

“I guess that makes me your husband,” he whispered.

“Forever,” I said, and shrugged, punctuating the word with finality, rather than doubt.

“I'm sure of it,” he said, and we toasted each other, almost silently.

The dining room was brightly illuminated, but white curtains covered the lower half of the windows, blocking the view. Mark and I, my family, my friends—we were safely contained on an island in the middle of Paris. All that was visible from our table was the sky, the green tops of the linden trees, and the limestone columns that have framed the gardens for over two centuries.

Within a few weeks, after our honeymoon, I was back in Paris, sorting through gifts of crystal and china, and I read in the paper about Guy Martin, the thirty-three-year-old chef who had taken over at Le Grand Véfour. Such things made headlines in France.

Two decades later, while planning the trip to Paris to commemorate our anniversary, I remembered that news story and was stunned to learn that not only was Martin still there, but in 2010 he'd bought the restaurant outright. Whether it was fate or choice or some kind of compromise that had carried him to this point, Guy Martin—like Mark and I—had remained devoted to the decision he made all those years ago. I was intrigued. I wanted to meet him and hear what he might have to say on the subject.

As I left for Paris, I was uncertain what awaited me. I suppose I wanted to recall the promise of my wedding day, to experience anew the splendid room, and to peer back on my less-weary self with eyes that were now two decades older and two decades more married. It was a sensation I sought, an assurance that longevity, whether in a restaurant or a relationship, does not have to equal decrepitude. I wondered whether my marriage had measured up to the place where it began, or vice-versa.

I hadn't expected to make it this far. Three years earlier, my relationship and all my beliefs had been shattered when I fell, briefly, for another man. Had the object of my obsession wished it, I would have walked across the ocean to Africa, where he lived, to start a new life with him. But he didn't, and my heart splintered in the aftermath. Agonized, I broke down, unable to move from my bed for weeks and then months as I stared out the window and flooded my pillow with tears for another man.

I reached to Mark to rescue me, and incredibly, he did. My husband saw me as more deserving of pity—or at least compassion—than punishment and forgave me for what was certainly a betrayal, but also, in his eyes, a most human transgression. In retrospect, I chock it up to midlife and hormones and the insane need to try and stop the mirthless passage of years. We were quite roughed up by the episode, but once I emerged on the other side—alive, first of all, and stronger—there were no more doubts that we would stay together. Forget about people changing, moving apart, growing in opposite directions. For Mark, to fail would have been to acknowledge a twenty-year mistake, and he couldn't brook such a waste of his time and judgment. Plus, we had never stopped loving each other.

But Mark and I would have to celebrate that victory—and our milestone—together, later, at home. He was stuck stateside with a pressing deadline, and besides, we were broke again and couldn't justify two tickets to France. So I would be dining solo at Le Grand Véfour. It wasn't at all what I'd hoped, but I was curious nonetheless and even excited, for both that transcendent realm of my six-course lunch and the fact-finding mission with Guy Martin that would accompany it.

The day before my reservation at Le Grand Véfour, I retraced the path I took on my wedding day. I visited the palatial
mairie
off the rue de Bretagne where, after the ceremony, the mayor of the 3rd arrondissement handed us our official
livre de famille
, with blank pages for up to eight kids. Had the playground across the street been there on our wedding day? If so, I never noticed. Before I had my children, now fourteen and seventeen, a sandbox and jungle gym were all but invisible to me. Now I stood near the playground trying to remember how Mark and I had traveled the meaningful distance from the
mairie
to Le Grand Véfour. Had a car taken us? How did my friends get there? I didn't recall being a jittery bride, but I was surprised to have erased that detail as well.

This time I took the metro to Bourse and walked over to the gardens, where I lingered over an alfresco breakfast of café crème and a brioche. It was an April day erupting with color and heat, and I tried to imagine how the courtyard must have appeared long ago at this time of year, from up above in Colette's salon. “The Palais-Royal stirs at once under the influence of humidity, of light filtered through soft clouds, of warmth,” she wrote. “The green mist hanging over the elms is no longer a mist, it is tomorrow's foliage.”

After my coffee and stroll, I took the long ride back to my old neighborhood near Père Lachaise, where I was staying in a hotel. At the front desk I felt the ions shift in a blast of sensory memory; to my disbelief, standing beside me was one of my husband's dear friends who had been a witness at our wedding. We were utterly stunned into silence and then, laughter. An Australian artist, he was living in Arles and had done the paintings in the hotel. I hadn't seen him in eight years, and his wife had recently passed away. Mark and I weren't able to attend her funeral service, and I still felt awful about it. We hugged, caught up on all our children, had a drink, and wondered where the time had gone.

The following day, upstairs at Le Grand Véfour, I met Guy Martin and told him about the strange coincidence and how pleased I was that my friend would be joining me for lunch. He wasn't surprised.

“This is a magical place in a magical setting,” Martin told me. “There's nowhere else in the world like it. When you do an important celebration here—no matter what happens down the line—it will always lead to exceptional things.”

When I walked into the restaurant, it enveloped me in the familiar. Twenty years seemed utterly insignificant—both the vestibule and dining room appeared untouched by the passing decades. But incredibly, nothing felt stale or neglected. It was there still, that gleaming lightness that made me feel like I was swimming in soda and that heady sensation of being instantly transformed into someone of consequence. As I stood on the carpet in a pool of sunlight, I nearly ached with life. The room was still shiny and alive and bursting with anticipation.