To cure his agoraphobia, Dr Simon suggested a simple solution. Pietro was to walk as far as he could from his lodgings before panic set in, then return. The first day he managed one hundred and fifty yards. In succeeding days, safe in the knowledge that he could get at least that far, he was to go a step or two further. By the end of the first week he had made it to Magdalen College where he touched the stonework before heading hurriedly back to his lodgings.
As the weeks went by he found himself inching up the High Street. One evening after work he reached the crossroads at Carfax. He turned and pressed his fearful legs a little further. It was like leaving the earth’s atmosphere: he was out, beyond gravity, in a floating world.
He regarded the colleges not by reputation, of which he was in any case ignorant, or by architecture, but by their distance from his house. He believed they helped him on and he was grateful to the early landmark of All Souls, the approach of what a painted notice told him was St John’s and the welcome of a neo-Gothic brick institution on the way out of town.
PARIS
FRANCE 1979
THERE SEEMED TO be a conspiracy among the French to prevent Pietro from understanding them. Shown a French newspaper, he could immediately tell what had happened. Given a French novel, he could not only follow the story but see if the writer was any good. But when they talked, he heard a continuous vowel burble in which it was not possible to say where one word ended and the next began. Some well-known expressions stuck out from the noise, so there would be a long ribbon of sound, then cinéma, more uncut ribbon, then très bien. There were enough spiky or unmissable words for him to have an idea of what was being said, but never enough for him to understand with a completeness that would have made the conversation worthwhile.
This was the first major failure Pietro had suffered for some time. He had been hopeless at school to begin with, it was true, but by the end he had belatedly come into his own. Hearing Laura talk about books had inspired him to read. He didn’t read his first novel by Dickens until the age of twenty-three, but in a way it was more rewarding. He wasn’t compelled to understand or enjoy books; if he didn’t like them he didn’t finish them, and at the age of twenty-six he could see better what Flaubert was driving at than he could have done at the age of fifteen when he first declined to read the set text at school. He liked books of ideas rather than narratives of people’s lives. His knowledge was patchy, but passionate in unexpected areas.
He stayed in a small hotel near the Gare du Nord where he was well placed to see the Americanisation of Paris. His nearest café was a burger bar where the waiter wore basketball boots which he called ‘les baskets’. People fulminated in the press against the corruption of language and the loss of culture, but Pietro was quite glad because each English word that took root in the vocabulary would reappear as a beacon in the otherwise incomprehensible Parisian burble. They had a way of trying to throw him even with their anglicisms: they liked to chuck in an extra ‘t’, so the food was processed in a mixter, and someone at dinner asked him if he played squatsh.
His eye was caught by the giant advertisements in the Métro. Young women caught in a moment of lively hesitation on a windswept street, their skirts billowing to reveal their legs – three metres long on the hoarding, against a cream tiled wall with a tunnel in the background. Children, brightly dressed, leaping hugely above the platform, their health assured by some vital milk derivative. Films from which the dramatic stills were as large as a cinema screen and on which the lettering, across an empty track, was made bold and powerful. His camera fired.
The first time he had plunged into a hole in the pavement he had found a different world: not Paris, but an independent state with its own geography, climate and character. It was as rich and strange as any place he had visited. On the map were names like Barbès-Rochechouart, Solférino, Filles du Calvaire, Réaumur-Sébastopol. Some were imposing, like Châtelet, Nation or Défense, some sinister like Denfert-Rochereau, with its suggestion of hell, some obviously foreign like Wagram or George V, some baroque like Reuilly-Diderot, some weird like Iéna, and some lovely, like Mairie d’Issy, Mairie d’Ivry and the most beautiful of all, Mairie des Lilas.
On Vincennes-Neuilly, the straight east-west line, the modern wagons rolled on their rubber wheels, chasing each other across the city with an eyeblink between them, their wire conductor brushes circling briskly against the charged rail. On other lines, such as Porte d’Orléans-Porte de Clignancourt, they still had rattling wagons on which the doors had to be opened by hand. Some of the stock that clanked away to remote areas like Eglise de Pantin looked as though it might have transported the wounded back from Verdun.
In the lettering of the names, the look of them on the maps in the carriages and the sound of them as Pietro repeated them wonderingly in his head, was a universe as complex as a microelectronic circuit, yet in its subterranean way as grand as a painting by Géricault. It bore no relation to Paris itself, to the streets he walked when he left the Métro. These were just variations on the theme laid down by Baron Haussmann: carved boulevards and squares, with narrow streets interlinking, the architecture of Napoleon III dominant. The Métro was its own world, more interesting because of the character of other places to which the names of its stations gave it access.
Rather than merely wonder at it uninformed, Pietro sought out articles and books. He became an expert in the subterranean country. From the aerial platform of Barbès-Rochechouart he peered down at the hectic street scene below, a big junction of the Boulevard de la Chapelle, where Zola had set his novel L’Assommoir. One founder was Armand Barbès, a revolutionary politician born in Guadeloupe, whose death sentence was commuted to imprisonment by the intercession of Victor Hugo. He was exiled on Belle Ile, a Breton island not unlike Cornwall, and later in Holland. The other was the Abbess Marguerite de Rochechouart, a redoubtable leader of the Abbey of Montmartre in the early eighteenth century. The station had seen the start of the worst ever Métro disaster. A carriage which had caught fire was sent back to the terminus in the belief that the flames had been extinguished. But the fire began again, asphyxiating eighty people in the station at Couronnes. Barbès-Rochechouart was also the site of one of the first acts of open armed resistance against the German occupation, when a Colonel Fabien (also known as Frédo) shot Alfonse Moser, a German officer, on 21 August 1941. Fabien, who blew himself and several other people up when wiring a mine near Mulhouse in 1944, was rewarded with his own Métro station: Colonel Fabien, which replaced the former name of Combat, which had been given because it was the scene of open-air fights in the eighteenth century between dogs, wild boar and sometimes tigers.
Combat fell victim to superior claims. Others became unstations as history dictated: on the outbreak of war in 1914 Berlin became Liège, and Allemagne became Jaurès in honour of the great socialist leader assassinated by the incredibly named Raoul Villain. Jaurès had, in Pietro’s view, the particular honour of being a correspondance with three other lines. To have a station named after you was one thing, but a triple correspondance. . .
He was not much interested in the trains themselves, only in the human dramas they joined. The haphazard, cruel nature of history was exactly reproduced in the station names. Here was no order of merit, but pure chance. Eleven French writers were honoured, but they did not include Molière, Racine, Balzac, Verlaine, Rimbaud or Baudelaire. They did include Edgar Quinet, author of the 1833 prose poem ‘Alias verus’, and the itinerant nineteenth-century Gascon poet Jasmin. No Flaubert. No Proust, though he had even lived on the boulevard named after the architect of Paris.
There was an impressive martial air in the Métro too. Partly this came from the names like Stalingrad, Austerlitz, Wagram, but also from the printed instructions regarding reserved seats. ‘1. Aux mutilés de guerre. 2. Aux aveugles civils.’ Pietro could not help wondering how many war-wounded were left from 1914–18, and how in any event they could prove in an argument with an injured civilian fighting for the same
seat that their wound had been sustained under fire. He was not aware that France had participated in later wars, apart from the Resistance movement. He was therefore surprised to read in a battered book he found in a second-hand barrow an entry on Bir Hakeim, a station whose name had caught his eye: ‘This was a fortress in Libya where the French troops resisted heroically under General Koenig for almost three weeks against the tanks of Rommel’s Afrika Corps in 1942. Their action permitted the British to retreat to El Alamein.’ Pietro knew what had happened in Italy, but hadn’t otherwise interested himself in the events of the war. What he knew came from his father. He had had the vague impression that the French had been on the other side. He also remembered that El Alamein had been the scene of a British victory. Perhaps that had been later. It was perplexing.
The Métro’s attitude to foreign people and places showed the same element of chance as in its honouring of French writers. As well as the fort at Bir Hakeim, the country of Argentina and the little town of Campo Formio near Venice were selected. From all of human history the seven people chosen from ‘abroad’ were three revolutionary leaders, Bolivar, Garibaldi and the Greek Botzaris; one artist, Michelangelo; one American, Franklin D. Roosevelt, author of the New Deal (Nouvelle Donne); one king, George V; and an outdoor-concert sponsor, Lord Ranelagh. In his Chelsea garden the lord had installed a bandstand for daily public recitals. In 1772 the governor of the Château de la Muette gave permission for a similar building to be erected on the lawn of the castle, then just outside Paris to the west. It found favour with the court and was increased in size in 1779. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, it disappeared. The area was absorbed into Paris, next to the noisy streets of Passy, whose thermal baths and rustic beauty once attracted Balzac, Lamartine and Victor Hugo. The Métro station still bears the name of Lord Ranelagh, unpronounceable even to the English.
‘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 t
hrough 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.
QUEZALTENANGO
GUATEMALA 1974
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’.