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A Californian dreamby Jean-Michel MAULPOIX Translated into American English from the original French by Catherine Wieder
10.30 p.m. Our plane is going down towards Los Angeles. It will land on a plantation of Christmas trees, a huge jewellery box, a horizon similar to that of a movies, a full collection of stars. America breathes its fires : hundreds of square miles of shining lights, billions of bulbs, millions of unknown lives on 100 watts blown up out of all proportion. America is a gigantic electricity bill. Its big show begins in the sky. That very dream which I had come to look for strikes me just before hitting the ground.
Yet, around the landing runway, there are only low buildings of a mediocre architecture. Then, in the corridors of the airport, old age developments and worn out upholsterings. I was expecting more luxury.
The President of the United States in person welcomes me : white teeth, chubby large smile : « How are you ? Was it a good trip ? » His pink picture is the first American face I come across as I leave the plane. I don't remember having ever seen in France the portrait of the head of State elsewhere than in townhalls and a few administration buildings.
Long waiting line in front of the passport control. One should deserve America. After an eleven hours flight you must prove that you are still capable of being patient. Sociality on top of it all. Everyone in his turn here, you don't cheat, you don't bump into one another. Such a country wouldn't be able to tolerate the foreigner you are but on the only condition that he should scrupulously adhere to, and respect its rules. You come here either for business or for leisure. You are going to use that pretext to learn discipline again.
No welcome committee more impressive than that which awaits the passengers of international flights on arrival at LAX. Once the customs formalities have been carried out and the luggage picked up, the newcomer walks up a sloping tunnel and rises up as if it were from a subway underground station amidst a waiting room jammed with people : a huge crowd is congregated on the guardrail separating it from the travellers. It stands there as if perched on a belvedere to look upon the vistors from the sky arriving from below. Going out looks like a triumph, you've crossed the Atlantic and America greets you. People of every race and colour seem to be waiting for you but they don't even look at you, they don't even see you : they were hoping somebody else was to arrive.
From this free-for-all of silhouettes, I can make out a small cardboard on which my name is written. Profr. C. came to meet me. His beard is pepper and salt grey, he wears a pair of jeans and a checked shirt, exactly as I had imagined him to look like. We greet each other politely. I find this man very likeable.
Outside there's a strong smell of kerosene. My first gust of air. So, America has its smell. Luke-warm night, yellowish night. Trolleys cross each other, luggage pile up, limos station, clusters of travellers disembark from buses : such are the ordinary details of any station, but I eagerly drink, as if it were a new alcohol, the electric light of the American night.
Profr. C. takes me to his old banger : a Nova Chevy of a greenish-yellow colour bought in Texas. Few books and a few scattered newspapers on the back seat. First avenues, first palm trees, first traffic on Highway 405, heading for Westwood. Six tracks on each side. Long sliding into night. Traffic flows freely. We speak a little about my journey, about the organization of my stay, of the few lectures I'll give at the U.C.L.A. Profr. C. comes from Switzerland. He speaks with a strange accent, half Californian, half Waldensian, obviously very happy to be here and to have exchanged his cable car tickets for an unlimited Green Card in a huge cinema house.
Along the motorway, always the same low constructions with neither charm nor perspectives. Nothing delights the eye nor startles it, but the gigantism of ad posters. Far away Downtown sky-scrapers only remind me the old clichés of a Promethean America greedy of power and miracles. Here nothing is worth seeing. My candid hopes are however not disappointed without my knowing quite well why, belief imposes itself that this very ordinariness has some meaning. It strikes right. Somewhere it's probably justified. A strange feeling of space and openness goes along with it and dismisses it. Such an absence of structure compels one's eye to rest on nothing : one's conscience is left free. Such is my first discovery. None of the films I had seen had ever brought such a similar sensation : one must have set foot on the American continent to become aware that its space becomes at last a reality.
I stay on Veteran Avenue not very far from a cemetry of white crosses. Late in the night, Profr.C. left me here with my suitcase. Alone at last, I can visit the place : two large rooms painted in white with a kitchen corner, a bar, a TV, a fake chimney old style hiding the air-conditioning vent and huge cupboards that will remain empty. The small bathroom has two ventilating fans : one for hot air, the other for cool air, mosquito nets double the large picture windows. No image on the walls. Everything is correct, comfortable, functional. A small balcony overlooks a quiet street. The area is posh, « safe » as they say here : one can jog or walk one's dog.
Roughcast in a dirty pink, that building is four storeyed. There's a swimming-pool, a launderette, a ping pong and billards room where they serve coffee on Sundays. The population which often changes is composed of foreign scholars, business men, and some wealthy students. Flats are for most of them rented monthly. It's no place where to settle, only a passage way. Exactly the opposite of a boarding house. People come here either to work or to sleep. What's essential takes place outside.
One of the main roads of the city, Wilshire Avenue linking Beverly Hill to Santa Monica is only a few blocks away. The traffic never stops. There too, there's nothing worth watching : no shops, no shop-windows, only miles and miles of asphalt and huge empty pavements. Only the Westwood area, filled with restaurants and cinemas on the other side of the boulevard concedes the pedestrian : four or five streets close from the University campus become a little more lively on Friday nights. I postpone my discoveries to the following day, swallow a sleeping pill and fall asleep.
At 8.a.m. here am I eating spuds, bacon and scrambled eggs in a Westwood fast-food restaurant, watching the joggers and the cars filing past : so, that's my America, at last ! On that Easter Sunday, for the first time it becomes mine. Time and space in front of me, open wide. Looking like Rimbaud in his Green Cabaret. Ordering toasts in bad English. Drinking tasteless lukewarm coffee, that light coffee America is so proud of, boiled and boiled again a thousand times on the counter. Confused, a little sick but happy. Donald walked on the moon, but I am sitting in a bar in the country of Donald. Alone like an egg in the bottom of the plate. My heart is slightly scrambled because of jet-lag. But already caught in the trap of American self-satisfaction, as if that plastic beaker filled with dishwater had the power of a philtre and were sufficient enough to grant me access to God knows what superior condition. One doesn't need much to become a true American : a pair of jeans, to look relaxed, a plastic beaker filled with either coffee or coke. For the rest, names are here : Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica. You belong to the sect of those who met the stars, loitered close to their villas, went through the same streets and walked on the same pavements. Your « ego » is thus enlarged, which means that all of a sudden you find yourself crammed with the images of all films and words of all songs : the world's dreams are yours while you chew spuds in technicolor in a banal fast-food restaurant in Westwood, on Easter Sunday '94 at 8.a.m.
Looking vaguely Chinese, a waiter brings me two twin flasks : « Tomato » and « Tabasco » : I don't like ketchup. Would America then be a purge ?
This country has no substance. Once the excitement has gone, I only make out its void. It sounds hollow. I can't rest on anything. I have no idea on how to find my bearings. Nowhere do I succeed in isolating some element that would give me the proportion of the whole, the directions for use, the direction to be taken. Everything is floating, untied. Here am I lost in a civilization which seems to have undergone a gigantic psychoanalysis and which inflicts it in its turn to whoever discovers it.
My cure has started. An intense narcissistic vexation. I am nobody. I exist for no one, nobody looks at me. In Paris, as you walk in the streets, looks wander too, catch you just for a while, hold you, then leave you : they may allow you to believe that you do exist in other people's eyes. In Los Angeles, such an eye footling is reduced to nothing. Passers-by rub shoulders without seeing each other. They have no face since they don't stare at each other. You don't meet either men or women, you meet heads and bodies. I knew solitude, now I meet confinement.
« Nothing to say to nobody. » Here people don't speak, they smile. I've lost my tongue. I take a few angry notes in English. « Here you are sure you are nothing. And you've just to pay and die. » This world is not for me. Poor guy who thought that either things or people were waiting for him somewhere. Insignificant humbug, here is your America, it's nothing but the refraction of your own void. Fit of spleen at 8.a.m. in front of a foul brew. Would I have come all the way to here just to realize that I no longer understand anything about anything ? Break up the sparse landmarks I had left ? I didn't know until that very day how much a European I could be.
Yet, California might me one of my provinces …
I must react. I call a cab and go back to the airport to rent a car. In such a megapole, you don't exist if you don't drive along.
It's a huge green Ford with a white registration plate with blue figures. I chose it for its rusticity in a catalogue of powerful and multicoloured cars. Firemen-red, ice-cream pink, lemon yellow, fluorescent green or Californian blue. Here, cars look cheerful. In France the fashionable colour is metal grey. It's the official dress of elegance and Republican centralism, the hue of the office suit and well-tempered culture. On this side of the Atlantic, style is an obsolete category : it's rather sun and desire that take all the decisions. An expansiveness of the person : the car becomes his outfit : roofed down, cool looking, merry.
I discover the attraction of automatic gearbox : it prevents from jolts and vibrations. Hardly any noise : the car does not run, it slides. Hence does it easily become a kind of drawing-room. One lives there with the windows shut in an air-conditioned micro-wave, radio on. Were not the roads in such a bad state, one would believe sometimes that one is on a flying carpet. Besides, those magical cars are equipped in such a way that one would easily drive them without one's feet : when the highways are so endlessly straight, two switches on the wheel are enough to accelerate and stabilize the speed. You can unwind, practice some yoga, take off your shoes and relax your feet. You drive with one hand only, a glass of soda in the other. Speed being limited, people never get nervous. Drivers are calm, disciplined and polite. No cutting in front of you the Sicilian way, nor starting like a whirlwind at the green lights. Driving becomes a bourgeois pleasure, it longer tries to outstrip space with speed. It reconciles it with time. You measure your trip in hours rather than in miles.
In my big Ford, I take things nice and easy. My uncertainties drift away. What a frugal meal and a glass of bad coffee had not succeeded in making it possible, the car does : here am I truly an American fellow, rather a Californian, i.e. mobile, automatic, air-conditioned, like a drop of blood fitted with a registration plate, driving towards the Ocean in one of the huge main roads of the city of angels.
The Ocean and I we immediately recognized each other. Those encounters with the blue is such an old love-story ! It didn't take me long to go down Sunset Boulevard meandering through the villas, towards the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. My elation is boundless when driving my machine on the Pacific Coast Highway, heading towards Malibu. My mind is not unrest because of film fantasies that would now trouble my mind, but only the ideal neighbourhood of road and water : every viewpoint on the open sea renews my happiness to live.
It didn't take me long to find out that the most interesting places on the Coast are the Piers : those large wooden jetties, built on piles going forward on to the Ocean. At the edge of the city, they are the only places where people stroll with pleasure : under your feet you can hear the waves dash against the wood, you can watch boats, fishermen and sea lions, you ponder over the angles of the coast, the tumbling down of hills and the edges of the town whose uproar pass away here, taken over by the ceaseless breaking of the roller from the Pacific Ocean. On those piers, benches and tables are provided, there are also sea-food restaurants and a few shops. People sell hooks for fishermen and souvenirs for the tourists.
In Santa Monica, I thus took up residence, facing the Ocean in front of a wooden table painted in blue ; covered with silvery tags and gull droppings, sitting on a blue bench, next to a blue dustbin, with blue lampposts and blue guardrails. I ate pranws and chips, turning my back to America and casting sidelong glances towards China. Perfectly happy, yet mortal in the daylight having within arm's reach the whole beauty of the world.
All along the sea, between Santa Monica and Venice, people stroll and skate. People run, meander, slide on the surface of one's own life. Or rather, of life, just like that, which no longer seems to be someone's. One runs on America. Rollerbladers have monopolized cycle tracks, swaying both arms with the regular movement of a pendulum, identical to those Scandinavian champions of speed on their ice rings, their busts bent forward, the Californian skaters to their everyday exercise, their walkmans on their ears, light rucksacks on their shoulders. They ride under palmtrees without watching the sea, swallowing space and miles, burning their calories, wondering only about how to move faster and further, knowing that the end of the world does not exist, but only the end of their own strength and that space, always, remains wide open, so huge and fleeting that the very meaning of life holds only to this repeated momentum, day after after day, in light, without any other plan than reach as late as possible, even the latest possible, the end of this life, having made all the efforts that were necessary for that : to eat light food, never to smoke, to drink a lot of water, and to sweat under the sun miming with one's arms the beat of time which no one would escape, and moving away like them with the obsessive movement of a mechanical toy whose spring would be winded the furthest it may go.
Californian skaters are the new heroes of America. I hereby erect a stele to pay tribute to their vain race, to their sweat and their consumation. They have understood that a man never recaptures his own life. Instead of remaining for a long while on the sea front, studying the infinite as poets used to, they have gazed into infinity which they absorbed and have released it step by step in every single race. Day after day, they repeat the same path right at the end of America, along that West Coast where all dreams wear out. From now on, they go from north to south, or from south to north as a wild cat paces a thousand times against the wire of its cage, for failing to still be able to leap freely towards any savannah. The insane roll of film of the Hollywood studios which used to transfigure the tracks of the Gold Rush into images turned itself into a thin film of asphalt on which the castors of the rollerblades let people hear the very same regular clinking as those movie cameras and spotlights of the Metropolitan's and of the Warner's. This time every one has his own cinema, his own golden section, his own America just for himself. |
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