A brother of mine once had a striking dream in which we were both dancing a Waltz in a Viennese ballroom.
As my partner and I whirled past, my brother told me, he cried out in anguish, “Trace, What is Mystery?” I only raised my eyebrows, in surprise, perhaps. In incomprehension, probably, and whirled on and away.
We used to laugh about it, my sweet bear or a brother and I, but I know the dream troubled him till his death.
Well, then, as the world is bien fait...
Just the other day, beyond the city walls, at the source of the river Seine, Mystery reared up and told me what.
Mystery is unnamable, but not at all mute, rather the silent words of a beating heart or the ineffable motive of an explicable act. One never knows when Mystery will reveal itself. But when it does, your heart is broken and you are ruined, forever. All the same Mystery's not so bad. And far far better than most other things.
The illumination came about because Karine & I went over the wall the other day for a reckless little motoring venture outside the city – love that word, “motoring”.
That is, we translated to the other side of the Paris ring road – la Périphérique.
Translated. Mystery’s truth is found only outside your particular city walls.
Apparently, even Socrates knew this: our inner metropolises are grids where routine eventually substitutes for dream – even for our Parises, even our Jerusalems, even our Athenses, our Idahos. This is why, Paris within the walls, intramuros, is not the same creature as Paris without the walls, extramuros.
We toured the world-historical Côte d’or department in a Ford rental. Although reality can be pesky, it is only a low-grade illness, so I am able to durably remember it as Karine and I in a two-seater Stutz Bearcat, goggles raised, long silk scarves flapping in the wind. I invite you to do the same.
In our case, revelation begins as a reasonable lack of credulity. Were this true for all!
The official explanatory sign at the archeological dig at the spring from which the river Seine rises on the Langres plateau in Burgundy – says the place was long a pilgrimage site. “Sequana”, it says, is the name of the good goddess of the place. A statue of her was found, it says, but at the dawn of the Christian era it had been deliberately defaced by blows from a hammer.
Once the preliminary facts have been disposed of, the sign explains that it is all very much a mystery why this place was a “pagan” pilgrimage site before Christianity became the only legal religion. Also mysterious: who in the world deliberately defaced the “pagan” goddess Sequana’s statue in the dawn of the Christian era?
What? None of this is Mystery that any sane person can not unveil if the will for it exists. A deeply green, deeply shaded, brightly lighted, lovely, spring that seems hidden and private and is yet in plain sight is still great for a picnic, for camping, for frolicking, even after “pagans” have long gone the way of the buffalo and any fat fool can drive up in his beat-up Chevy. Also, earlier humans, not yet in possession of monotheistic religion, capitalism and powerful earth-moving equipment, tended to have a snivelly fear of puissante Nature rather than of a vengeful god and/or of their human betters, so they made much of Mother Earth rather than just moving the bulldozers in.
Also, if it wasn’t the same early Christians who also knocked the penises off every statue in Europe who deliberately hammered up poor Sequana once they got the bit of exclusive legality between their teeth, I’ll eat Osama bin Laden’s burnoose.
I ask you.
Then there are Mysteries – properly speaking, “mystifications” – that are boldly presented as rational, even lucid, explanations, but simply defy all rational understanding.
The modern name "Seine", for instance, is said to derive from the Celtic word “Sequana”. But once each pansemic phoneme has been sussed, it’s still a mystery just how a tongue, even that of a stone-age brute with a thousand years to lash at it, might squeeze “seine” out of “sequana” or even, as one bright soul hastens to clarify, out of “se ku a na”, is well beyond me.
It remains a mystery, too, how it is that, by the “regular rules” of geography, the river Seine at Paris is really the river Yonne, or how it is that such rules were arrived at in such a way that the celebrated rivers Seine and Yonne would be exceptions to them.
“Karine, do you understand any of this?”
“No. I’m completely mystified. You?”
She gives me a sharp look. I feel her daring me to make some ridiculous claim. Understanding the polysemic phonemal variational evolution in Galloromantic country dialectic, perhaps.
I dismiss this quarrelsome woman with an unseen wave of the hand.
“I asked first. And, no. Yes. No. Well.”
It comes to me. “Listen, Karine,” I say, cupping my ear in my hand.
“In the days when we first met,” I begin, “You were just making a friend of your great professor. Remember?”
Dead now, he was a very nice fellow, indeed.
I met the Professeur Arouet rather formally, I reminded her, when she invited him for lunch with us at a restaurant.
Karine's idea was that, around the table together, we would, could, then, all agree to use first names. That accomplished, she would use the social momentum thus engendered to invite “François” Arouet home to dinner!
“I was so excited.”
And no wonder, I thought. Inviting one’s particular esteemed Monsieur Arouet is something quite special when you’re a student.
“You really, really loved and admired your Arouet. So much.”
“I did.”
To this very day, sitting next to me in this Stutz Bearcat, watching the road with an easy attention as she steers us through the Burgundy countryside, she is grateful Aouet existed. She brims, is brightened, with gratitude, this sweetest and most profound of all feelings, which, as far as I know, is exclusive to moments of real loving or real learning.
It was in waiting for this important Lunch with Arouet that I was shuffling around on the corner of the rue de l’Ecole de medicine, in front of the Gibert book shop, staring at the clumps of humans fluxing up and down the boulevard Saint Michel.
There are many, many human species, billions of them, I have come to see. This is why there are so many suits at Brooks Brothers.
There.
As if determined to broil as well as run mad in the noon-day sun, one short, stocky specimen is wearing a winterized, shiny, bluish-orange watered-paisley affair of a jacket, the cheap, poncho-like, fabric draping stiffly above a scratchy-looking set of high-waisted, dismatching pants.
I said to myself, “So he’s the guy who bought that!”
With not much to say for his shoes and haircut either, I just guffawed and scuffed the ground, like a certain lower-class of American will do around his cracker barrel.
The outfit might very well spontaneously combust from rubbing the pants legs together or from trapped body heat. Hardeeharharyep.
Then, I had a Walter-Mitty moment. I woke to find the specimen smiling and waving at me as he dodged through the snorting, increasingly aggressive herd of automobiles crowding onto the crosswalk of the wide, wide Boul’ Mich’.
I had just had time to think, “O, no, he thinks I’m …” when Karine burst by me, crying, “O! Monsieur Arouet! Nous voilà! Nous voilà!”
I realized then that that absurd suit, bought and paid (very, very damned little) for by the specimen demonstrating it in the public thoroughfare, was none other than my (then new) Dulcinea’s preferred professor.
Snatching bonne figure from the pickle barrel, I was able to twitch my cracker scoffing into a rictus of what was presumably understood as pleased recognition.
We did, of course, agree to dine.
“It was my job to get François and bring him to your sister’s house,” I reminded her. Karine’s sister’s house is three Métro stations plus a pretty long bus ride outside Paris.
“It was so sweet of you to offer,” Karine smiles pleasantly.
Actually, I had wondered that I was appointed to accompany our new-friend. I was too ignorant in those days to dare ask anybody. Was I expected to throw my coat over puddles? Was there some secret to getting over the Périphérique. A tax to pay? Do only certain of us specimens know the way to the suburbs? Know how to take the metro? Know how to catch a bus? I had no idea.
Specimen Arouet – to honor Karine’s invite, again wearing that absurd suit, bless him – and I were sat down side by side in the Métro, bathed in the clack of the wheels.
Arouet said, “This is so good of you.”
He softly patted my hand, this man no older than I am today. He gently gripped my wrist.
I knew in a flash that he was going to break my heart and ruin me for serious work. Forever.
“Karine is so good to me,” he continued. “Voyez-vous. Such a bright student, so rare! And then she is such a pleasure to work with.”
He paused a full half minute, looked in my face, considered. “I am so happy that you are making it possible for me to accept her invitation.”
François Arouet then explained that he had not left Paris intramuros, indeed, had hardly left the fifth arrondissement, in much better than 30 years. Ever since he had been demobilized in Spring 1963, following his service as a conscript in the French army in Algeria.
“Until your petite amie invited me, to me, leaving Paris had not seemed worth the risk,” he said.
I saw his eyes tear and felt his hand squeeze mine, so I turned away and looked out the window, which was the only thing I could think to say in front of this Mystery.
“Are you as hungry as I am?” Karine said, striding towards the Stutz, breaking my silence. “I’ve had enough of Mystery for one day. Let’s go find some place to eat.”
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