May 3, 2003 Nantes
On this day next month I will be at my uncle's house in Boston, having left France to apply for next year's visa. A kind of sweetness invades everything once you know your departure date. I'm somewhat prepared for the exquisite longing of months before I land at the little airport in Nantes again. While I'm still in physical proximity to everything I'll miss, I'm asking myself what I will be glad to see again in the United States.

I will go to Chicago. I may go to Fort Worth. My home is here in Nantes. I'll see how K.'s sons have grown in Chicago. I'll see how nothing has changed in Fort Worth. I'll see how I've gotten so much older. I'll miss the raspberries in our garden in Nantes and the field mice the cat drags in. I read about Chicago, arrests in Chicago. There are prowar rallies in Fort Worth, though the war is over. I have been teaching high school students for the past six months, provoking opinions, and then helping them to express themselves in English.

C. is away at La Petite hollande. I'm sitting in the African chair, putting this down, knowing that in a month's time, still accustomed to the French hour, I'll regret not having gone with her to buy fish, vegetables, and our customary pineapple. She'll be back any moment now (the doorbell rang as I was writing this sentence).

May 4, 2003 Nantes
M., N.R., C., and little P. in the garden on a beautiful afternoon. Spent the morning in the bathtub reading THE CAPTIVE with the window open. Ate fish and tossed the bones to the cats. Played chess with little P. She knows how the pieces move and is beginning to calculate defensively. C. wore an odd, elegant Indian dress.

M. recounted her day at the beach, about the girl she and a vacationing firefighter revived. She complained about the fluid that came into her mouth each time the firefighter pressed the girl's chest to keep her heart from stopping. She said she was relieved when the girl started breathing again, because every beachgoer had gathered around them. Later, M. phoned the hospital to learn that not only the girl had recovered, but that a man had shot his father with a carbine. M.'s day at the beach.

Listening to WFMU and N.R. and C. come in and out, looking for fruit juice, sweaters, etc. The sun is going down and we decided to wait to go to the movies tomorrow, as there's rain in the forecast. C. comes in, leaves the Indian dress for warmer clothes. M. leaves to rejoin her son. Little P. is off roller skating. N.C. arrives from Noirmoutier, with tales of her grandson's manipulation at the hands of his father. "And where is your father," demanded young H. of her. "Well, he's dead," answered N.C., "He's very far away." "No," said H., "Your father's gone away to work."

News of G. starting a fight in a restaurant as it was closing too early for his taste. He's working construction, getting paid off the books. I haven't seen him myself for months.

May 5, 2003 Nantes
Late getting up. Went to the Jardin des Plantes and continued THE CAPTIVE. Approached by a young man wanting a cigarette. Very happy to have one of my little cigars instead.

Saïd. He walked right out of my novel. Admitted he was a thief but, like Arsène Lupin, he stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He pointed out his own clothes, which were in good order, his own bag, which needed a slight repair at the corner. One of the custodians of the JdP, dressed in a suit as thin and threadbare as its occupant, eyed us suspiciously. Saïd works construction until he has enough for a hotel. Good looking guy. Shoes in good order. Lonely I think. Took my mechanical pencil out of my bag and wondered at it a little. Showed me his hands, the blisters on his palm, a nail that had been crushed in letting down some weight. Je suis Berber, he explained. Je peux dormir n'importe où. He replaced my mechanical pencil and told me about a village café he stopped into, the fight he was forced into.

He tells me he doesn't have a car, doesn't have a home. He shows me a identity card photo of his mother, kisses it, explains that her confused expression only meant that she didn't know they were about to take the photo. He drops his cigar into a fold of his coat, retrieves it, relights. For a moment he is back in the café fight. Etait comme ça. He is miming the fight as the garden custodian walks by again. After two kisses he kissed me twice more, telling me this is how we do it in Morocco and then he told me how to shake hands in Morocco. He was gone before the custodian made his way back around. I gave Saïd the rest of my little cigars.

I checked my pockets while walking home but unfortunately found nothing missing. Nor was I followed. So I have little hope of finding a new pair of shoes outside my door tomorrow morning.

May 6, 2003 Nantes
The day slips away in half hours, short opportunities to do little, which I let pass untaken. Am in the garden, listening to the wind in the poplar. Bees hover everywhere, despite the wind as if on surveillance missions. I have read every newspaper twice and feel very unclever for it. I don't know what I want to write, but I do know what I do not.

I do not want to record any observation on my progress in THE CAPTIVE. Everything seems unworthy of attention and I am worrying that a certain tolerance for my own indolence and mediocrity is setting in. Can I still make a fiction? Can I tell a straight story that isn't a language teacher's bank holiday? I know that I can sleep, even against the awful truth of having made no effort. The future itself isn't all that inspiring, considering the rage and self-regard which I take to be loose in the United States.

I have been here in my chair and still long enough that a jay landed in on a lilac branch in the family A.'s garden. Soon the girls will come home from school and set themselves to playing on the swing. This only provokes an odd sadness in me that I am not one of their schoolmates. Why do I constantly imagine that what enters my regard must please me in some fashion? Why do I imagine that my thoughts are worth recording? (The jay has long since left the lilac branch. In fact, he did so even before I had finished writing the sentence that recorded his arrival). I wonder, but don't worry about, where Saïd finds himself now. It was warm last night and will be warm again tonight.

May 7, 2003 Nantes
Looked at the coffee cup to find out to which café I've come. But there's nothing on the saucer, so I drink the coffee. And there's nothing at the bottom of that either. I order a croissant mostly to get another plate that might tell me where the hell I am. But no luck. I could get up, go outside, and look. Do I want to surrender my place to the constant march of university students coming through the place? No. Besides I can see the presse from my table and it is always interesting watching people choose their periodicals.

The kid on the cell phone is no help. He doesn't tell his friend where he is. Nor would I, were I to speak to a friend at the moment. I don't want to be met, or crossed with, or bumped into. I could get up and buy any number of papers that would tell me anything I wanted to know about Africa. But I don't want to know about Africa at the moment. I want to know the name of where I've cornered myself in case, in fifty years, I want to return and corner myself again.

I don't want to know about Henry Kissinger, either, but there he is on the page of Le Monde I've posed before me, staring out of a photo taken when he was my age. I cannot, in good conscience, say I will return to this yet-to-be-named corner café, for in fifty years I will be eighty-five, if I am still myself.

A reader of this reading in 2053 will likely have difficulty finding this corner café beside the Erdre. I wish the café and the reader goodwill in equal measure. I hope the tables will be replaced when they need replacing and not before. I hope the reader has enough in his bank account that his pulse rate remains steady when the envelopes arrive from the bank (for I suppose banks will be the last to change their ways and continue with a deluge of paper upon their every client).

I am, for the moment, findable, but not findable to myself. Not until I can discover the name of this café. I could, I suppose, scratch J'était là, but that would be a disservice to the café, which has the right to expect a normal service life from its furniture. The groups of college students who will certainly occupy my place upon relinquishing it, who might, by some yet immature aspect of their person, cause themselves shame in the eyes of their colleagues by adding moi aussi or somesuch, and it would be a disservice to the reader of 2053 who might waste time looking for this table (which in all likelihood will occupy some worst corner of the municipal dump of Nantes) out of some misguided nostalgia which is beyond my intention.

Not that I feel any better recording this, well, meditation. It might after all be an improvement to scratch Je m'appelle Durando into the tabletop and leave the thinking to the readers of 2053. I am after all, nobody you want to ask directions or advice from. I am, happily, no Henry Kissinger, a fountain of murderous advice from the moment the photo in Le Monde was taken. Better to be forgotten than remembered in the manner of Kissinger.

The coffee cup says nothing, even after I turned it over. Nobody around me is saying where I am. I could scratch Une légèreté coupable which is the subtitle of the Kissinger article into the tabletop if it weren't for my continued good wishes for the café, but it closer to my sense of mild shame in trying to scratch anything into the attentions of those kind souls to whom we still lack a formal introduction.

The people around me have now ordered lunch. The waiter is bringing beer. My nameless cup, saucer and plate have yet to be cleared away. My coins lie untaken and the presse is empty. Kissinger got away with everything. I'm wondering if I will see the year 2053, even as I'm ending. At home there is a year of unopened envelopes that will one day settle into nameless corners of the Nantes municipal dump. Durando was here. Une légèreté coupable.

May 8, 2003 Nantes
A late night at THE CAPTIVE and C. glued to the television. Leftover tuna for supper and she was still very hung over. She's rattling through the house now and I'm in the garden, having done an amazing amount of dishes. Time is dividing itself into useless half hours again, as we have a trip to Trentmoult planned for this afternoon which first means a trip across town to borrow CB's car. I have to be much more diligent about my time.

Finally entered RW's changes, but have yet to send the essay to DW. I'm trying to think of a pretext that would allow me to show the essay to the Atlantic before publishing it in his magazine. Doing so makes me feel rather nasty and egotistical. I promised it to him after all, and I should hang with my friends, for it is exciting to watch their plans make progress and to be a part of it. Thinking about publishing makes me feel old. It is as if I'm still waiting to begin the kind of life I know I'm capable of, not that I imagine myself as a magazine writer. It is rather that I would one day like to stop thinking about the relative validity of my approach, stop preening and get on with it. Also to stop looking for approval, which, I am told, is a symptom of middle age.

"Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart," writes Proust. If one is capable of receiving beauties like that one, it should follow that one is capable of producing them. So much seems to hinge on waiting, yet I'm afraid the waiting can be an empty habit. Can you wait so long for a rabbit to come down the path that, when it comes, you recognize it as something else entirely? Or, after having focused so long upon your prey that you fail to discern it from the image you've constructed? Perhaps we are saved by a shift in the modalities of the senses: the real rabbit is the one with rabbit smell even if it is, to all appearances, a cat.

May 9, 2003 Nantes
A day spent apart. Shut myself in rather than go to Trentmoult. C. up after nearly two days lying in bed, set herself into a fit of angry housecleaning. Given our moods at the moment, it was certainly a good thing I didn't go to Trentmoult with her--this charming fishing village on the Loire has come to symbolize a kind of impatience, even an annoyance. It would be better if I were more apparently busy to C. Perhaps getting up at the same time every morning, doing an hour or so of housework and then heading to the café, returning with the groceries in time for dinner would do the trick. Must redouble my efforts anyway. Forty pages of Proust, no more or less, every day. Two hours, at least, of honest effort on the novel, every day. Ha.

Remembering how both New York and Boston seemed less congested than my imaginings of them. American cities so much less dense and thus more bleak. Was never taken with Chicago and still cannot understand those who are charmed by place. Was in one of my less nihilistic phases when I chose to move there and had solicited the opinion of everybody in the Wash. U. community who had spent time there. Even while relatively happy there I was constantly struck by how bleak and charmless it is. Even St. Louis, my least liked city on the planet, worse in every way than even Ft. Worth, had the ruins of charm about it. The disused stone carriage steps still set into lawns seemed like the silvered pearls hung around the widow's neck. Chicago reeked of hamburgers and stale beer but the soundtrack was good.

I am wondering how I will find Boston--the shock of returning from France has been profound the three times I've experienced it. I remember getting of the train from New York and thinking to myself that everyone seemed to dress from the same J-Crew catalog, that the bars closed too early for it to be an honest town, whatever honest might have meant at the time. I will withhold my indictments until C. has had a chance to see it.

Finished THE CAPTIVE and on to THE FUGITIVE.