I’m back. The trip from Taipei was fine for the first 13 or so hours, I boarded around midnight and went into a coma as we passed over the Eurasian land mass. It was dark the whole distance. And then came Paris, the city of ‘half light’ on a gray winter day. Europe has been wearing a cold blanket for the past several weeks. England, poor England, is covered in snow and paralyzed. Spain is coping with more snow than it’s had in years.
Charles De Gaulle didn’t seem so bad. There was a bit of dirty snow alongside the runway, it looked like it had been scraped off the tarmac about two or three days before. After getting my luggage and stepping outside the terminal for my first cigarette since leaving Taipei, the weather was brisk and slightly humid but not impossible. The skies were low and gray but that’s winter and it’s to be expected.
I wandered away from Terminal 1 and found the train that took me to Terminal 2B and Easyjet; well, not actually to Terminal 2B but within a kilometer of it. My flight wasn’t yet ready to board, I’d gotten in at 6 and they weren’t taking any baggage until 8:30. There was a kiosk selling undrinkable coffee that I gagged down and a croissant that I’m going to write to Sarkozy about. I thus passed an enjoyable half-hour before I got the chance to consign my bag to Easyjet.
Freed of the responsibility of hacking around with a suitcase filled with Taiwanese treats for my daughter, I found another kiosk whose proprietor was in cahoots with the operator of the first I’d been to but this time I found a convenient bin into which to pour the contents of the cup of ‘coffee’ he sold me before they ate through the cardboard cup.
Flight time approached, I went through security – always fun when you’ve got a metal hip on one side and 15 screws holding your leg together on the other. I moved to the front, waving my crutch at folks so they would know that I was one of those needy souls who required early boarding. I found a chair near a couple of families coping with babies who were not pleased with the way things were going and, as is the wont of babies, were robustly expressing themselves. So far, so good.
Of course, they didn’t board us on time, but with the weather in Madrid and over a lot of other European cities, a delay was to be expected. Forty-five minutes later, a half-hour after we were scheduled to have taken off, the ground staff vanished, literally vanished – I think there may be hidden stairways behind those desks where they stand near the gates, always seeming to be very busy, huddled over their monitors, playing World of Warcraft.
So, about a hundred and fifty of us stood or, in my case, sat, and stared at each other, wondering what to do. I’m not like that, though, I’m a man of action, at least I was after 20 minutes or so. Of course, the onset of initiative may have been helped by the fact I needed to pee and there were no toilets on this side of security. I got up and hobbled back through the friskers and past the x-ray machinery to the check-in desks, stopping at the toilet. Back at check-in I was informed our flight had been delayed an hour. I figured, selfishly, my fellow passengers would eventually deduce without any assistance from me that the flight wasn’t going for some time so I wandered away through the terminal rather than back through security, deciding that I would take another shot at finding a palatable cup of French coffee.
You know, it’s a wonder to me still that you can cross the border down there near Monaco and stop at the first cruddy looking station on the Italian side, ask for a coffee and be immediately transported to cappuccino heaven. How can that be? What is wrong with France?
You’ve probably figured out that our flight was delayed even more than the hour I was told about and you’re right. We were postponed another 45 minutes and then another hour and then two hours. At some point the young Walmart Welcomer who stood at some type of lectern just before the ribbon-tape maze that you line-up and shuffle through at all airports, so that you can be informed that you have to pay extra for your bag, actually had no idea about the flight at all, she even asked me for information. I was beginning to slip into a Kafka novel. Clearly action was required, drastic action.
Now, the French are still struggling with the art of coffee making but they’ve got a modest reputation for wine and I decided to put that to the test. I found a slightly plastic bar-cum-bistro manned by a surly and completely unmatched couple. The female was a blue-black-haired (that stuff seemed to suck in the light) twenty-something type with an interesting, albeit also frightening tattoo that spread its sinuous tentacles up her neck from somewhere below the collar. The male half of the sketch was a shaven headed young North African immigrant, pleasant, rather shy and without a clue about what he was to do as a waiter.
I sat down and asked for a glass of wine (which I can ask for in twenty seven languages, including French!). After conferring together, the couple determined that what I wanted was a glass of wine, red wine. There! First time out of the box they got it right! And the stuff, at four or five euros the glass, was very, very drinkable. I had two. Landing on the scant contents of my stomach (half of a stale croissant), the pair of them (the wine, not the folks running the restaurant) quickly imparted a nice glow. But, they improved the young couple running the bistro at the same time. Their attitude got better and the female’s gleaming midnight hair was, I realized, actually just one of those French fashion things that they can pull off and I can’t. The snaky tattoo thing was actually a bold statement using the side of her neck, and who knows how much more of her body, as a canvas on which to write a commentary about post-industrial life. The North African was not just a new, nervous employee whose waitering skills were tested every time he brought a glass of wine, struggling to keep the tray balanced but a symbol of the new France, the Rainbow Nation of Europe.
Pretty soon I was feeling left-bankish. The plane had been delayed again, I’d confirmed that because there was a conveniently situated departures monitor which I discovered outside the toilet after my third wine. I pulled a hand-made notebook out of my backpack and a beautiful new pen my sister-in-law had given me for Christmas. This was just the moment! I was here, in this enormous concrete carbuncle of an airport, sitting at a bistro table. This was France, this was the place where Sartre and Camus and Derrida and so on had helped to frame the literary and philosophical dialogue of the world after the War.
I ordered another wine and began to write. Here, let me quote from my new notebook, which has a lovely green cloth cover decorated with painted, elegant Chinese characters: ‘This is my notebook’. Yep, that’s it, I deconstructed the notebook; I captured in that short sentence the whole existential anguish of the airport. My notebook was real, the wine was real (the second and last sentence of the entry is: ‘I’m having a wine’) but the flight, Madrid, the airport, that was all getting a bit blurry. I think it may well have been fading away as a nice case of jet lag arrived to help things along. Or it could have been some break-through in my perception of the material world although I think it could have been the ‘vin’.
And so the afternoon wore on. I eventually ate something, it was good, lamb I think. I had one more wine and then it struck me that, attractive as it was, I really didn’t want to sit at that little bistro for the rest of my life so I ordered a coffee! I can report that although my senses were ever so slightly affected by the wine, they were as sharp in the afternoon as they had been those eight or ten hours before when I’d had my first coffee on arriving at CDG (that’s Charles De Gaulle for short or, possibly, it may stand for Café Du Garbage). Night was falling, set off by the warm glow of institutional fluorescents, my flight had reappeared on the departure list, life was good. I paid and leisurely wove my way through the thickening crowd, through security and onto the plane. I got on the right one by cleverly confirming with everyone that this flight was going to Madrid (the one in Spain, just to be double-sure).
The rest was easy, I let the crew take care of the flying bit and the taxi on the Barajas end the driving bit. Our doorman was kind enough to take responsibility for the get my luggage out bit and push the elevator button part. I easily found my way down the hall to our apartment door and after only two or three tries was able to make the doorbell work. That attracted my daughter’s attention, who intelligently (she is my daughter, after all!) linked the door bell’s sound with the presence of someone without, wanting in. I was back in Madrid!
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