The Port of the Moon
The sun was high above the poplar trees as they drove away from Chateau Nullepart, which looked, as it always did in summer, like the fairy tale castle of naïve children’s books. Teddy put on his sunglasses and waved away the pungent smoke from Lala's spliff. He unwound the window to let the air in and the fumes out, which caused a drip of ash to fall from the dog-end in Lala's lips and leave a little smudge on her summery dress. Her shaking was better now, and though sometimes an unimportant imperfection, like a smudged dress or a smile out of place, was the kind of thing to provoke a mountain of rage, like the proverbial straw which broke the camel's back, this morning, for equally obscure chemical reasons, she was able to resist.
The Girondine countryside slipped agreeably by, agreeable as all countryside vistas are, especially to those starved of them. Inversely, Lala and Teddy enjoyed the occasional trip into town. They drove along the route national as far as Langon, before taking a ticket from the automatic booth at the peage. There, they joined the flow of lorries, trucks, and cars making their way along the tarmac river flanked, intermittently, by the pine woods of the Landes, and rows upon rows of Bordeaux vignobles.
Teddy turned on the radio, and a France Bleu Gironde jockey opined on the ongoing referendum campaign in the United Kingdom. He, like most commentators, notwithstanding the serious agitators for leaving the European Union, thought it unlikely. There were plenty in France of a similar mind to those English populists. Rightists like Le Penn, and leftists like Mèlenchon, weighed in with their moon howling, jingoistic, entirely simplistic contributions. Though Teddy liked current affairs - in a quietly desperate way, fearful of being ill informed - he could not quite cope with the people who populated it.
'Why don't you turn that off. It doesn’t make you a better person,' Lala said. Teddy nearly choked on his next words, incredulous at Lala’s lack of self-awareness.
‘Well, what about you and that London station and that fucking awful man?’
‘I don’t take it seriously, Teddy, it’s just a bit of jibber-jabber, and I must say it makes a change from Mr Laconic and the idiomatic African.’
'Neither do I, and I’m not laconic,' Teddy said, not saying another word. He turned off the droning voices and stared at the road ahead, thinking of nothing. At the Bordeaux peage, Teddy paid for his ticket with his Credit Agricole bank card, and the barrier lifted and let them through. Customs guards had stopped a van on the other side and stood with folded arms while the poor, swarthy looking driver was made to unload its contents. The motorway joined the rocade, and from then it was not long before the sight of the Garonne, flowing muddy brown under the Mitterrand bridge appeared before them.
A pontoon bridge with provisional pylons buried in the mud below the river, led from the new, white, oval arena on the opposite bank at Floirac. It was deserted, save for a banner which said that work had stopped due to industrial action. Poor Simone Veil, thought Teddy, she will just have to wait for her bridge. Both sides of the river were undergoing enormous re-development. The old meat market was being pulled down, and tall block office buildings, and residential apartments were going up. Beyond them, the neo-classical façade of old Bordeaux gleamed golden in the sunlight. It had not always been like this.
When Teddy and Lala had first moved there thirty years before, the locals had called Bordeaux 'the sleeping beauty', because its ancient and beautiful limestone buildings lay hidden under a crust of black petroleum pollution. The serene riverfront was obscured by warehouses holding millions of cases of wine destined for America, and the rest of the world. Around those warehouses, junkies sat in niches injecting themselves with heroin, sometimes dying on the spot, while prostitutes took their johns up hidden alleyways and lifted their skirts. Maquereaux, pimps, flick-knife wielding assassins of virtue, controlled the bleak behemoths at night, and often during the day.
That era ended when Alain Juppe was elected Mayor of Bordeaux. He took control, banishing and vanquishing the ne'er-do-wells, and tearing down the Dickensian warehouses, sandblasting the buildings' façades, and building a sleek and modern tramline throughout the city. The metamorphosis was dramatic. The beauty, awoken.
Now the city was alive and growing, and the foreigners and Parisians moving to live there in droves changed the city's old parochial nature into a dynamic one. All that was left of the old city was its old-world charm, good manners, and a gentleness which surprised those more used to a dog-eat-dog world.
Teddy parked the fiat in a bay by the river, near to the car park where market traders still sold cheap goods from the backs of white vans. They were packing up for lunch like everyone else. Here, one still ate a leisurely lunch, though that too was changing, and businessmen in suits could occasionally be seen stuffing a sandwich or Burger King burgers into their mouths while walking and barking into a telephone.
Teddy had booked a table at La Tupina, on the rue Porte de la Monnaie, where the chef composed Basque specialties for gourmets and gourmands alike. The head waiter took their names and showed them to a table set for two, which looked out onto the quiet side street.
Shortly, a handsome, North African waiter appeared.
'Bonjour,’ he said, and gave them a charming smile which pleased Lala. He added, 'Would you like an aperitif?'
'I'll have a white pineau please,' said Teddy.
'Pastis,' said Lala.' The waiter gave a slight, graceful nod of his head, and disappeared through the swinging doors of the kitchen and adjacent cave. He soon came back with a small round tray carrying one tumbler filled with straw coloured pineau de charente, and another with the greenish yellow pastis two fingers deep in its bottom. The waiter placed them on the table and added a carafe of water. He offered a menu and began his spiel about the daily specials.
'Alors! Today we ‘ave magret de canard stuffed with foie gras with mushroom sauce, or, should you prefer, monkfish with butter sauce. Or would you like a set lunch menu, or a la carte?'
'Duck,' said Teddy.
'Fish,' said Lala.
'Tres bien!' said the waiter, 'and the wine?'
'Oh, let me see,' said Teddy, poring over the red leather-bound wine list. 'I'll have a half bottle of the Haut Medoc. Lala, do you want some white with your fish?'
'Bottle of Graves,' she said, feeling taciturn now that she saw that the waiter was not much of a flirt.
'Very well,’ he said, and again disappeared.
'Well, this is very civilised,' said Teddy, fearful that he was losing Lala. She said nothing but gazed out at the people passing by. She fought the rising high tide of insanity which swelled dangerously at her mind's dockyard. She thought about the nickname the Bordelaise had given their city: port of the moon, because it lay on a crescent bend in the Garonne. In times gone past, the clipper ships had sailed right up to the Pont de Pierre to load their liquid cargo. I am like a port of the moon, a mad moonchild, thought Lala. But she was not going to give in. Not today. The aperitifs were finished quickly.
When it came, Teddy chomped down the duck breast greedily, arranging a morsel of meat and a sliver of unctuous liver on his fork each time. He glided the delicious textures through the viscous sauce and rolled his eyes as they melted on his tongue. Lala ate one bite of her fish, then filled her glass to the top and drank it down, slurping as it went. The waiter, who had come to ask if everything was to their satisfaction, did well to hide his mild shock at the way Lala was putting away her drink.
'Lovely wine,' she said, 'so complements the fish.' The waiter drew himself up proudly. His own family had settled in the Graves, right in the heart of Pessac-Lèognan. His father was a sommelier.
'That is because wine is the blood of gastronomy,' he said, smiling proudly at their appreciation. Lala and Teddy smiled back. They shared, each in their own way, his love for something so important, even if their own obsession with it had for them, crossed a real-world Styx to Hades from a dream of Elysium.
After they had eaten, they caught the tram from St Croix, changing at Porte de Bourgone, and alighting finally at Gambetta. From there it was a short walk to the Musee des Beaux Arts.
The 18th Century Palais Rohan housed the Hotel de Ville as well as the museum, and the St Andre Cathedral and Pey Berland square were already busy with tourists waving their cameras and smartphones at the buildings and statues.
Mostly, they took photographs of themselves, wearing wide grins, pointing at the objects they could not be bothered to read about. As they were about to head up the side road towards the museum's entrance, Teddy suddenly spotted an unlikely sight. A gendarme, surrounded by a modest crowd of tourists and locals alike, was staring up at a sofa which had been somehow placed on the three metre high, thousand kilo, bronze sculpture of Bordeaux's favoured son, former mayor of Bordeaux and prime minister of France, Jacque Chaban-Delmas. How it had got there only God, and the perpetrators knew.
Teddy laughed but Lala stared blankly.
'How the bloody hell did they do that?' she said. 'Nutters!' Together they carried on and finally entered the big wooden doors of the museum.
Inside the museum, Teddy knew what Lala wanted to see, and they ignored most of the other pictures by famous old masters. Lala loved the symbolism and pastels of Odilon Redon. He had been born in Bordeaux, not that Lala knew it when she moved to the area, and she had steadily fallen in love with the outward expression of this man’s internal life, which culminated with a literal blossoming of esoteric images of phenomenal power and strangeness. It was as if the fin de era of the Belle Epoch had manifested its desire for peace and beauty, in a final desperate cry before the 20th Century in Europe got properly underway with its insatiable appetite for calamity and awfulness. Redon’s later painting were the songs of what might be, a realisation that The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity.
After the gallery, Lala felt tired, and the need for her marijuana and strong alcohol. They returned to the car and sat in silence while Lala lit one of her spliffs. She inhaled deeply, and felt the fuzzy disjointedness overcome her immediately, while Teddy rolled down the window to inhale the road’s petrol heavy air.
'Thank you, Teddy.' Lala looked at him through the calming buzz growing in her brain and felt a wave of emotion pass through her body. It was a powerful wave. Much stronger than usual. And, instead of finishing as it usually did, with the uncontrollable sexual urges all thoughts led to during the last ten, fifteen, (or was it twenty?) years, it broke, foaming with sympathy, crashing on the shores of her deepest being, dragging the sandy particles of her senses towards her heart. How strange, she thought, to feel like this again.
'Oh, you know,' said Teddy. 'Good to get out and about.' He knew, through the familiar eyes peering at him, scrutinising, that Lala was still in there, among the fractured parts of her being.
Teddy started the old fiat and had to brake sharply as he pulled out of the bay, while an impatient cross face sped in front of him, showing the lack of manners so many people suffer from.
They drove over to their apartment which over-looked the Place des Quinconces and parked in the car park nearby. Though the sun still sat happily up there, high above the city and beneath the never-ending blue sky, both felt exhausted by their day out. Teddy led Lala, his arm outstretched, as they slowly climbed the six flights, both thinking that buying an apartment without a lift had been an oversight. At the time they had been seduced by the locale, and young enough to think that old age was a place still very far away.
The Place des Quinconces was a public square - one of the largest in Europe - on the site of an ancient fortress strategically placed to guard the city of Bordeaux, where once guns were fixed upon the Garonne River to dissuade the ships of invading pirates or nation states. Now it was a space for events like circuses and funfairs, concerts, and markets. There were several statues, the most prominent of which was an extraordinary, giant pillar, surrounded by a fountain with the bronze heroes and creatures of ancient mythology. Teddy thought it overbearing and preferred the less imposing statue of Michel de Montaigne off to one side, a quiet figure thinking in the shade below plane trees like Handel’s Xerxes.
Lala and Teddy, on occasion, liked mingling with the other well-heeled and tasteful city residents at the twice-yearly antiques fair, who were always in abundance in a city as rich as Bordeaux. Sometimes they dined with Angel at the Belle Epoch restaurant, with its art nouveau décor and good food and wine list. They loathed the fun fair and made sure they were not in residence when the noisy, screaming, flashing tackiness descended, shrouding the elegant, stone and tree lined balustrades with excitable children and mountains of candy floss.
The flat was quiet, insulated from the bustle outside.
'Fix me a gin, will you, sweetie,' said Lala, the moment they walked through the door. On an unfashionable dark wood, Alsatian buffet, stood a silver plate tray crammed with bottles of spirits. Of the three types of gin, Teddy chose Gordons, for though it was cheaper than the other brands on display, he knew that Lala preferred the taste. He pulled a can of slim-line tonic water from its cellophane wrapping of six, and pulled the tab, releasing the carbonated hiss into the almost eerily quiet atmosphere. Teddy filled a glass with ice from the large, American fridge in the small kitchen, and then poured in the gin halfway, tonic the rest, and handed the mixture to Lala, who sat, still smoking, on the Majistrati sofa, staring blankly up at the ceiling.
'Thanks,' she said.
'You know, I'm rather tired,' said Teddy, 'I might just go to bed.' He looked tired, thought Lala.
'Oh, go on. I won't be long.' Teddy shuffled into the bedroom and began to take off his clothes. He pulled a pair of clean, ironed pyjamas from the commode, where the maid had left them. She came twice a week, regardless of whether they were present or not, to dust and make sure everything was ready should they decide, as they had done today, upon an impromptu visit.
As he stood in his underpants, he caught sight of his reflection in the tall empire bedroom mirror. He held the black and grey striped silk pyjama top in his hands, like a capote de brega, defending his white Y fronted loins from the speeding charge of his own, ageing, falling apart image. His chest sagged like a Hogarth harridan's, the biceps in his arms hung like chicken wattle. His face, the nose and upper cheeks flecked with angry purple, protesting the liquid and smoke which flowed always through his veins, sharpening, and tightening the vessels of his blood. No wonder she wants to fuck others, he thought. He pulled the pyjama top over his head without bothering to undo the buttons, left his pants on, and climbed under the duvet.
Though it was dressed in clean linen, the bed smelled of something he could not put his finger on. Lack of use, he thought. Can something smell of lack of use? Not stale, like morning French bread in the afternoon. But a lack. His bed in the chateau did not smell like that. It practically stank. But Teddy liked it that way. Sloth, some would call it. Teddy lay in the bed and looked up at the ceiling. He heard the radio playing in the sitting room. Lala was listening to LCR, London Chat Radio. She had something of an obsession for one of the presenters, a man with an insufferably smug voice and high dose of sanctimony. Teddy had seen a picture of him once, a fat, bloated man, with the puffy eyes of one who stays up too late drinking and eating, and then gets up too early. Repulsive. But, then again, there was that reflection. Who am I to talk?
Presently Lala switched it off, came in and climbed into bed.
'Sleeping?' she said.
'No, I was listening to you listen to that awful man. Wasn't that Jeremy's voice I heard on the radio?'
'Yes, cheeky bastard has the effrontery to phone up from his house in France to demand that Britain must leave the EU. Do you think they'll do it?'
'Buggered if I know. And Jeremy would know all about that although he's the one who likes to do the buggering. Surely people aren't that stupid. Though if people are dumb enough to elect a man like Baden-Flogg as MP, they're dumb enough to do anything.'
'Oh well, I suppose Jeremy has his points, he's practically old family you know.'
'Yes, yours, not mine. He's certainly a plausible liar.' But Lala had already drifted off, leaving Teddy with words on his lips but nowhere to place them. Instead, Lala snored loudly, and Teddy remained awake, listening to her death's rattle snore, which sounded in the once again quiet night, like an awful premonition.
