The cats came back again

20 years ago today I adopted my cats Mesha and Sonia from the pound in Anchorage, Alaska. A year and a half later I’d adopt my third, Hopey, from an adopt-a-pet stand in San Francisco. Mesha passed on June 22, 2007; Hopey on Nov. 28 of that year; and Sonia this past February 24, at the age of 20-something. 20 years!

I just took a bike ride along the canal here in Walnut Creek to pick up a cheap bottle of rouge for dinner. On the way back I stopped to look up at a circle of light peering through the gray clouds, and imagined it was my cats, and imagined what they might tell me on this day 20 years after I rescued Mesha and Sonia. They told me that not only were they rescued, but — what lives were in store for them! I thought of the 20 years and of how much I had to give to them (vice versa too), not just how much love but the adventures we had — from Alaska to San Francisco, to New York, Paris, and for Sonia (and Hopey for an all too brief time), the countryside in southwest France, and a river (which Hopey, a real water fiend, loved — the largest water faucet in the world that river was), then still for Sonia, all around the south of France and back to Paris twice. I mean who knew that Mesha would go from the pound (or as I liked to say, the Alaskan tundra) to the couch of a charming Parisienne on the rue de Paradis (the day he escaped from my apartment and went upstairs to my neighbor’s). Back here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve felt that my family, or at least my brothers, are taking me for granted. So I asked my cats for advice. The advice they gave me is that from those packed 20 years, those intense and adventurous 20 years, they know how much love I have to give, and also the richness I offer to my entourage — those around me. So — I deserve better. I’m wasted here. On to New York, my real family, the family who came to me not because of what I am but because of who I am.

My French crisis

Okay, I miss it. I really thought I was French at heart. How can you love so much of a culture and not find your place?

Hypocrisy, thy name is France

About a decade ago, newly arrived in Paris, I got in an argument with a new French friend because, as I understood her (10 years later, we still disagree over whether something got lost in translation), she insisted that being Jewish wasn’t a culture, or race if you prefer, just a religion. Being an agnostic whose background included being Jewish (I place this heritage fifth after San Franciscan, citizen of the world, Californian, and American), I insisted it was. If Sabine were here she’d point out that my reaction — walking out of the car and away when she was in the cleaners picking up her clown costume — was extreme. Nevertheless, I already understood then that the reason France likes to think it thinks that Judaism is just a religion is that the last time it identified it as a race it deported 72,000 of us, only a couple of thousand of whom came back, the rest, including 11,000 children, being gassed or otherwise killed by the Germans. So since then, as part of its penance, France has tried to pretend that it is race-blind. Well, apparently no one informed the media, because at the first opportunity they get to describe someone as Jewish (or any other race, for that matter), they do so.

Thus, if the NY Times took six paragraphs in today’s story before mentioning — after a whole lot of more relevant biography — that the late Tony Curtis’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Hungary, the — Left-leaning — Paris daily Liberation took exactly three before identifying him as being “Jewish Hungarian,” a factoid it placed right up there with his stint in the television series “Jovially yours” (a bad translation of “The Persuaders”) as the most important detail in Curtis’s long life this side of “Some like it Hot.” Why do I reserve my wrath for the French paper and let the Times off? Because the difference is that here in the States, we acknowledge that we are not race blind. We acknowledge — even treasure — that people can be both American, and of Jewish Hungarian background. We recognize the part of Curtis’s story which has his parents coming into this country with another name long before he became “Tony Curtis.” The French, by contrast, because of their long historical guilt (for crimes that to some degree continue; witness the recent expulsion of the Romas, like most of the Jews deported, European citizens)), want to have it both ways, pretending that there are no distinctions, that we’re all French around here, and then jumping at the first opportunity to racially label the Other.

Brussels waves finger at France for deja vu deportations

The mighty European Commission, so quick to impose strangling limits on fishermen and suicide-inducing environmental regulations on farmers, has responded to France’s illegal singling out of persons of Roma origin — EU citizens, after all — for deportation by…wagging its finger at France and telling it it isn’t doing enough to protect EU citizens. In other words, instead of rightly going after France as the perpetrator of the crime, the EU has accused it of the passive misdemeanor of non-assistance to a person in danger.

J’ai demande de la lune

Here’s the fundamental question / Voici le question essential: (Tr. anglais / English translation to follow) Je ne comprendre pas pourqoui mon connection avec ‘la France’ — son histoire, sa culture, sa musique, ses films, ses livres, meme sa radio et son ‘tele’ — etait — est — si forte et, quand meme (ou si vous prefer, ‘sur l’autre cote’), j’ai ne pas pu connecte avec une francaise et, en general, avec peut-etre trois exceptions (Sabine, Stephane, et Patricia) , les francaises. Je ne comprendre pas pourquoi je me sens si francais au cour et dans l’espirt — mais, temp apres temp mes ami(e)s francaises m’avez jete. (Sauf Sabine, Stephan, et Patricia.) Ou plutot, a une moment donne, il y a une mur qui se pose entre nous. Je ne comprendre pas et ca me brise. J’ai pose cette question une fois a mon melleure amie Sabine — pas sa vrai nom — et d’apres elle c’est moi car ‘t’es quelqu’on difficile a vivre’ — elle a vite adjoute ‘comme nous tous’ mais…C’est pas ca. Oui, je suis quelqu’on difficile a vivre mais avant que je me suis installe en France ca m’a jamais empeche d’avoir les ami(e)s! A New York, a San Francisco, etc., j’ai reussi d’avoir un circle des ami(e)s a chaque ville ou j’ai habite. Et — j’ai a jamais — jamais — vecu avec mes ami(e)s ca que j’ai vecu en France, c’est a dire qu’au premiere signe du trouble — meme sans signe — ils se sauve. Et souvent, pas seulement pour ‘un rien’ mais apres… rien! Pas de debat. Pas de conversation. Pas des disputes. Simplement, un jour ils sont la, le lendemain pouf — disparu in thin air. Et ca — et ca, ca c’est pas moi.

I don’t understand why, on the one hand, my connection to France — its history, its culture, its films, its music, its art, even its radio and television — is so strong, and on the other hand, I could not connect with a French woman — and, on a larger scale — with any living French people, with the exceptions of Sabine, Stephane, and Patricia. Time after time, my French friends rejected me for a petty difference — and often, for no apparent reason at all. one day they were there, the next day, ‘poof’ — disappeared. My best friend Sabine said it’s that I’m ‘difficult to put up with,’ quickly adding, ‘like all of us.’ Yes, I have my problems like anyone else, but this has never stopped me from developing a circle of friends in any of the other cities where I’ve lived, notably New York and San Francisco. That my French friends would disappear over a small difference — and sometimes for no apparent reason at all – that’s not me. That’s not my fault.

Lifting the veil on the burka law

So the French Senate has voted, 276-1, to essentially outlaw the burka in public places, cracking down on the biggest threat to the Republic and Republican values, 2,000 women who cover themselves because of their religious beliefs. Let’s cut to the chase here: This is not about preserving Republican values, or protecting women of Arab origin from their radical Islamist spouses. This is about the French discomfort — be they Gaulists, Socialists, or Communists — with anything different. When I moved to Paris in 2001, people having their morning coffee used to look at me funny as I ran by on my morning jog — and I was barely covered at all in my shorts and sleeveless tee-shirt. One of the only two times I got asked for my papers was when I decided to have a picnic on the top of some stairs over a street and overlooking a tres Parisian park on the rue Lafayette (I am here!). No doubt a busy-body neighbor saw this unusual sight and called the police. I repeat: I was having a picnic. (Okay, the picnic included homemade sangria, but as the police didn’t ask to inspect that, I assume that was not the issue.) The issue here is not so much the police — indeed, they were incredibly polite — but the *mefiance* of the typical French person, one of whom had obviously called them because she saw something she considered out of the ordinary.

French television news no doubt featured all last week saturation coverage of the Koran burning that never happened, affirming American contempt for Muslims. But at the end of the day, it never happened, and was more about American stuntsmanship than intolerance. The French, on the other hand, overwhelmingly passed a law which clearly impinges on the religious freedom of some of France’s Muslim population. And here’s the key difference between us: For all our faults, Americans, starting with the president, realize that we have a problem with tolerance, *and we are working on it.* The French, by contrast, by a vast majority, not only have a problem with tolerance of difference, they don’t admit it. They hide it under the facade of protecting their holy trinity of values, liberty, fraternity, and equality, when in fact laws like that outlawing the burka defile all three.

Next wave

Okay so here’s the deal: I left France on July 8, 2010. Actually, I tried to leave France on July 1, 2010, but the British wouldn’t let me so they gave me back to the French who said I could stay but I left anyway for… complex reasons. For the past two months I’ve been wrestling with what my relationship to France would be… going forward. The simple explanation for why I’m not there any more is that with a couple of exceptions, I ultimately got along better with France’s past than its present; tr.: I found it challenging to connect with living French people. (Notable exceptions: Friends Sabine, Stephane, and Patricia.) Strangely enough, I haven’t been that interested in following what’s been happening over the past two months in the country where I just spent nine years. (Although I admit to being curious about the characters in some of my favorite French dramas: The nightly Marseille-based soap opera “Plus belle la vie” (how I could share a passion for this nightly show with 6 million French people but not share a life with one is one of the mysteries that still confounds me),
but also “Family d’accueil,” (Foster family; sounds better in French.) (When we last left this extended Bordeaux family, Papa had just emerged from the house with a tube indicating a positive pregnancy test. “Okay,” he asked, eyeing the wife with whom he’d just gotten back together, his adult daughter by a previous marriage, his teenage daughter with the current wife, and Tante ((Aunt)) Jeanne. The actress who played Tante Jeanne, Ginette Garcin, having passed away recently, that eliminates one.)

Now, as is often the case, comes the NY Times to galvanize me, at least into returning to France Insider for one entry: Its report of the 12 September demise of Claude Chabrol, with Jean-Luc Godard the last of the giants who fostered the New Wave / Nouvelle Vague, is so anemic and even erroneous, I had to take a look at the French daily Liberation to get some meat, I found it, and now so will you.

First of all, Chabrol did not direct 50 films, as the Times states, but 80, if you count television, and having seen a few of Chabrol’s films for televivion, including a couple this year — indeed they were his last, again contrary to what the Times reports — I can tell you there was no drop-off in quality from the big to the little screen. (The Times also doesn’t even mention his contribution as one of the writers to Godard’s seminal ‘A bout de soufle’ (Breathless))

So here are some telling remarks by Chabrol cited in the 12 September edition of Libe:

“”Honestly, I transformed the face of world cinema less than Godard.
There’s nothing serious about me, it’s terrible.

“I remember that in May 1968, my friend (the director) Pierre Kast
said, during a meeting, ‘Now, we know who are our friends and who are
our enemies.’ Like an idiot, I could not prevent myself from crying: ‘Alors, who?’ He was deflated, absolutely unable to respond.

“I have the impression to be the last of individualists, I was never
able to participate seriously in any group. I never had the desire. I
never had the desire to be represented by anything other than myself.
The only time where I joined a cause was in 1968 during the affair
Langlois for the Cinematheque francaise. And that was because I felt
myself personally concerned.” (He’s referring to what is still
considered a benchmark in French cinema history, when culture minister
Andre Malraux tried to fire Cinematheque director Langlois.)

Oh how far the Cinematheque has fallen: This last year’s big event was a festival devoted to the films of not Chabrol but… Jim Carrey.

And I, who preferred the black humour of Chabrol to the second-rate Jerry Lewis of Carrey am…back in the States, trying madly to find a blue cheese called something besides ‘blue cheese’.

Les Eyzies Law and Order

Well, after a week in which the dead chicken sat on a stake in Mr. Malraux’s cornfield waiting for the fox that had killed it and its sister chicken and two roosters to return and get snapped up by one of the five traps that encircled it, the long arm of the Law finally caught up with it.

On returning today from the little Monday market in the village, where I’d scored six bottles of Bergerac from the last millenium for 15 Euros, directly from the producer Marie-Rose, to impress my Parisian potes with, I saw Mr. Malraux’s mobilette not at his house but above the house at the other end of the path, and him standing below in the garden doing nothing. Approaching our end of the road, I waved at what looked by the tell-tale walking stick like a tourist emerging from the plain leading to the cornfield. Two minutes later he startled me by appearing at my door, whereupon I saw the “police’ insignia on his tan uniform.

“Ca va?” he asked, looking into my eyes as if something wasn’t. “Do you know who put the chicken there?” “Mr. Malraux put it there to trap the fox that killed most of his chickens.” “Is that his house?” the officer asked, pointing across the path. “Does he ride a mobilette?” “Oui!” “Si non, ca va?” I made mundane comments about our six-month winter of discontent here in the south of France, which does not seem to want to end, and this or perhaps my stumbling French (my level depends on who I’m talking to; Mr. Malraux, tres bien; a beautiful fille or the long arm of the law, barely understandable).

I quickly divined that Mr. Malraux must have spotted the policeman as he drove up to his house, figured out it was about the dead chicken that had been sitting in his dead cornfield for a week, and kept on driving, and was now hiding out.

The officer patiently waited, emerging from his yellow four-wheel-drive occasionally to take photos with a camera on a tri-pod, and not just in the direction of the dead chicken.

After about an hour, Mr. Malraux surfaced, in the company of another officer — they were neither gendarmes nor the police national, but forest rangers.

All three quickly marched down the path by our house to the cornfield, where, after one fetched a stick from the riverside, they sprung all five traps, gathering them up but leaving the chicken.

From my post behind the curtained bathroom window, Mr. Malraux did not seem unduly alarmed, but continued to bavard with the rangers, until he bid them, “Allez au revoir!”

I quickly ran over and knocked on his door to get the scoop, above all to find out if he was in trouble. “Not me, because I didn’t put the traps there! The guy who put the traps may be.” Essentially, it wasn’t leaving a dead chicken to roast in a cornfield for a week that was interdit, nor even using it to set a trap for the fox, but the type of traps (which to me had seemed antiques), which is why they had confiscated them. Above all, Mr. Malraux was upset that he’d lost two good traps, which he uses mostly for rats. “It seems to me that you’re the victim here,” I told him. “And they said they’re not going to help me trap the fox!” he added. Yet another way in which France version 2010, with its infinite interdictions, doesn’t seem to be working for the little guy, above all the beleaguered farmer which just last week, the fish and agriculture minister was giving lip service to sympathizing with. A fox had killed four of the five fowl that were all that remained to Mr. Malraux after a lifetime of farming, and which help supplement his social security by providing a few eggs he can sell. Before he gets any more chickens to supplement the one that’s left, he needs to trap that fox. And yet the long arm of the Law is more concerned with the form of trap than with Mr. Malraux’s livelihood.

I thought maybe the fox trap man Michel might feel betrayed that Mr. Malraux had apparently ratted on him, but no, he was back at 6 this evening, rushing down the larger cornfield next door where one of the four remaining farmers in Les Eyzies was turning the earth with his tractor. He held a little bucket and Mr. Malraux trailed him. Thinking it must have some rapport with the fox — the fox traps prohibited, were they now looking for smaller bait? — I braved the wind and rushed out and over the wet turned soil to ask what it was about.

“We’re looking for worms!” Michel said. “Large ones!” The fox trapper was going fishing. I joined in as they continued to traipse down the edge of every new gully Frank the farmer unearthed. “You’re the only one that’s working!” Michel thanked me as I tossed a palm-full of wet creatures into the bucket. “Oui,” said I, “mais c’est degoutant (disgusting)!”

The burka that covers the wheat-fields

Yesterday thousands of farmers from all over the country descended on the Place de Nation in Paris in a desperate call to save their profession, in particular that of wheat cultivators, who spend more to produce than they earn. In general, agriculture minister Bruno le Mer said, farmers earn 15 percent of what most workers make. Considering the essential and enduring place of farmers in the life of the country, you’d think that the government might have stopped everything to listen to them. But no, the cabinet had been convened by prime minister Francois Fillon to discuss a more pressing problem, a law to ban the burka, which afffects at most 2,000 women (as opposed to wife beating, which affects 250,000), and which became a priority for the right-wing government after it lost the recent regional elections, in large part because extreme right voters abandoned it for the National Front. (Whose leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is now saying he doesn’t necessarily favor a law banning the burka, because it doesn’t get at the heart of the problem.) So obsessed is the government with distracting the French from their ‘end of the month’ problems with this red herring, the interior minister jumped on the case of a woman who filed a complaint after she was stopped for driving with a burka by threatening to take away her husband’s citizenship because, he says, the man has four wives. (The husband says that like any good Frenchman, he has one wife and three mistresses. “Since when do we take away someone’s citizenship because they have mistresses?”)

As is often the case, my retired farmer neighbor, Mr. Malraux, has a simple explanation for the disparity between earnings and costs today’s farmers face: the tractors, and the gas they consume. While he used them in the latter part of his career, for most of it he propelled his farm machines — antique devices now lined up in front of his shed presiding over the path below — with cows or horses.

PS: Meanwhile, out in the cornfield — that of Mr. Malraux — it’s Day III and the one remaining live chicken is still there, as is the dead one lashed to the stake to trap the fox. We’re expecting 90 degrees today, Farenheit — ca va commence a pu.

Cock-a-doodle done

When we last left Mr. Malraux, my neighbor the retired farmer, he was planning to set a trap for the fox that had killed one of his two roosters and absconded with two of his three chickens, probably to nourish his fox puppies, using the carcass of the late rooster as bait. He abandoned that plan because, he told me, “I might accidentally trap a cat.” As the remaining coq-au-vin loitered on his porch last evening seeking morsels — even trying to enter the house — we considered whether maybe it was better to kill this one while we could still cook ‘im up as coq-au-vin a la vin blanc (better, according to M. Malraux), because if the fox came back, it would be too late. Coq-au-vin — the remaining rooster, I mean — had avoided his usual meandering around the ‘hood all day, until, unusually late for him — after 8 p.m. — his cry alerted me that he’d strayed over to my side of the path. I menaced him lightly with the bamboo cane to keep him away, and he went down the road in the other direction.

M. Malraux had told me to yell if the fox came back; the death cry of the other rooster had woken me up at 1 the previous night, while M. Malraux had slept through it. (The cry had been followed by what seemed to me more than one chicken clucking, which is why I’d been surprised that that the next morning only one chicken and rooster remained.)

I did better; as this was Saturday night, I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning watching Law & Order Special Victims Unit (maybe they should start a new one for roosters?) and Law & Order. No rooster cry or fox prowling could be heard. I even opened the window before going to bed; nothing.

And nothing to wake me up the next morning. The remaining rooster hadn’t got going until 7:30 the previous morning, so when I hadn’t heard anything by 7:30 I wasn’t alarmed. But as time went on, it was pretty clear that the fox had returned and killed the remaining rooster and chicken. Also a bad sign was that the carcass of the dead rooster M. Malraux had left at the opening to his shed was gone. Sure enough, around 9 a.m. I spotted M. Malraux from the window — looking very pissed and evidently looking for the fox, with his rifle strapped to his shoulder.

He was actually looking for a rat (a real rat I mean), he explained to me when I hurried across the road to get the latest. As for the rooster and chicken, he pointed to the shed, where two fresh carcasses were stacked up next to one of the tractors; apparently the fox had taken the one he’d left the day before and left two new chicken cadavres. “Now I have nothing!” the farmer said, more perturbed than usual, as I made sure to stay on the good side of his rifle. (The deaths of the other rooster and two chickens, while upsetting, had not crashed the threshold of the “what can you do?” shrug.)

When the fox trapper, who we’ll call Pierre, arrived in his small blue ’60s compact station wagon, he immediately set to work figuring out the best terrain to set the trap. Putting it right before the tractor shed — where the chickens and roosters actually lived — was out of the question because of all the people that pass by with their dogs, let alone the cats. So he decided to put it in the middle of M. Malraux’s corn field, which is on my side of the path and by the Vezere river. M. Malraux found a stake, which Pierre cracked was “certainly large enough!,” then they drove down to the river, me following on foot. The dead rooster or chicken (I can no longer tell them apart) he posted there looks like those corpses that you see bound to stakes in bad Cowboy and Indian or war movies as a warning to others. (“Roosters! Show your ass ’round these parts and you’ll meet the same fate!”) Around the stake Pierre placed five rusted traps, panting heavily as he opened and braced the jaws. Then he gently placed dead corn stalk morsels on each one, then covered them with dirt. Basically, there’s no way that fox can get to that dead rooster without getting trapped. For my part, I reminded Mr. Malraux that if he wanted the fox to bite, he should probably hide the other dead chicken.

While they were finishing, Mr. Malraux’s best pote Jacques showed up for his morning visit and eau de vie session. I hailed him. This probably makes me sound more important than I was, which was just a by-stander or witness with occasional wisecracks… But around here, it’s understood that any event — my tearing and burning down the dead walnut tree with my bare hands to open up the view and stop the annual bee sejour, for instance — is open to spectators.

And maybe that’s all I am here; when we all got back to the path, Mr. Malraux, Pierre, and Jacques went into Mr. Malraux’s to boire un coupe; I did not feel like I was in the coupe; one more threshold I can’t cross.

But my role as witness wasn’t terminated. Back home, out the bathroom window I saw what looked very much like the silhouette of a chicken on the path right across from Mr. Malraux’s. I ran over. “Mr. Malraux, Mr. Malraux! Vient voir!” It turned out I was not mistaken in believing I heard more than one chicken clucking after the first night’s carnage. One of the two chickens we’d assumed the fox had carted away to feed to his/her little ones that night had apparently just been hiding for two days. “Now at least you can have eggs,” I told M. Malraux, who was clearly happy all his remaining animal stock was not lost. “One a day!” said Pierre. “That’s all you need.”

I was relieved for M. Malraux. Earlier I’d told him, “You’ll be without an animal for the first time in your life!” A farmer with no animals; how’s that for an existential crisis? Later today, France Enter radio interviewed a man (in the Dordogne, as it happened) whose farmer father had committed suicide after 40 years in the metier because he just couldn’t keep up with the bank bills. Apparently, in the Dordogne (my department) more people die every day from suicide than traffic accidents. M. Malraux is retired so supposedly has a pension or social security, but still, I was worried. Indeed, given that he like me complained about one of the roosters always trying to attack him from behind, and pointed out that they weren’t really good for anything (you don’t need them to make eggs), I think if he held on to those roosters, it was because they have always been a fundamental part of his identity, even if he doesn’t need to be woken up before dawn any more.

As for me, it makes me feel guilty to give in too much to feeling relieved that I’ll no longer have to put up with that horrible rooster cry. And I can’t help wonder if the explanation for coq-au-vin’s crossing the path last evening at such an unusually late hour to my side was that it was his way of saying goodbye.