In the Company of Cats and Chocolate

I keep my company with a cat these days. This rusty-black German Rex cat with one cloudy blue-grey eye. He lives in the shed next door. Each day, after lunch, he stalks by the front stoop, grizzly and damp. He comes up the short walkway leading to my door on his way around back with taut, coiled steps. Once he is within swiping of distance of me, he pauses. Every muscle rigid, almost vibrating while he evaluates me. Perhaps of all animals, cats have the ability to glare. But this shed-dwelling sovereign exceeds all average feline standards. He is downright livid at me for bearing witness to his afternoon cat errands. At some point, he moves on with a authoritative “I pardon you” and tumbles in a graceless plunge through the shed window. He is my only company and he hates me.

Trinity College, Dublin

The truth is that, for the moment, I am more alone than I have been a considerable amount of time. Just me and the cat. The days arrive gray and rainy with a very vocal wind. The winds seriously shrill here as they run up the gabled, tiled roofs of the neighborhood. The windows buck against their frames and the bare tree branches are tiny chutes of sound that the wind barrels through in long hissing arcs.

While talking to my mother one day, she could hear it in the background of our conversation.

“What is that?” she interrupts herself mid-sentence.

“It’s the wind, I say. Don’t worry. It sounds worse than it is.”

“Do you remember,” she begins in that way that reaffirms that I’ve forgotten important lessons from French class, “that the French have different names for the winds. They’re supposed to have different effects on your mood. The way they say the Santa Anas do.”

I don’t remember this. And haven’t heard this. But it turns out that yes, there is a wind in France called the Bise Noir which is said to drive villagers mad. Something I am certainly at risk of here a bit – tucked away in front of the computer screen sprinting through as many chapters as manically as I can.

Someone recently shared with me the blog of a woman who chronicles her solo travels. For Valentine’s Day, another blog enumerated the benefits of being single and abroad as covered in this woman’s posts. Among them are the lack of itinerary, the ease with which you meet other people, excitement, newfound confidence, and the ability to forge lasting connections with those that you do meet.

The observations themselves aren’t revolutionary, but they certainly seem true. Which means, that yes (even besides the cat), I haven’t been entirely alone.

Molly Malone, Dublin

On my last night in Dublin, I had no hotel. This was an intentional maneuver since my flight was somewhat early in the morning and I knew that some Irish pub would surely be showing the American Super Bowl. I figured I would save a few Euro and just stay up late. After several hours wandering Dublin by myself and dinner at an Indian restaurant where a group of Welshmen (flush from their win that day) invited me to join their conversation, I ended up finding a pub in Dublin’s Temple Bar promising seven screens of Super Bowl viewing. I went inside and leaned against a cocktail table by the nearest blue and white Tom Brady jersey that I could see, dubious about my Patriots during that first quarter.

The game was going badly for my team and I think I was scowling a bit, but a fresh-faced and cheerful looking Irish boy looked over at me: “Patriots fan?” he asked and I nodded and he pulled me up to his table with one arm and said “Aw, come here.”

After that, I felt very much at home with some ardent Dublin Patriots fans. We pumped our fists in the air at touchdowns and, at other times, stared fixedly at the TV screen willing the scores to change when things took a turn for the worse. Between quarters we smoked cigarettes out front and the Irish Patriots fans asked me questions about my book, one of them admitted to being a poet and a human rights advocate, the other, an engineer. We talked about New England and we talked about football. In the final hour of the game, no one was allowed to leave the bar and we sat back-to-chest and shoulder-to-shoulder watching those last few yards between the Giants and touchdown close dismally one by one. I watched them score and with a minute left in the game, I held my breath for every play until the Patriots finally lost.

As we wandered out onto the street, we slung our arms around each other and let loose some commiserative moans. For another few minutes we stood there, talking, laughing, and finally getting to the point in the conversation where we exchanged Facebook profile names with promises to find each other eventually. And so there – the first friends that I made as a solo traveler (if you’re reading this now – Hi Peter and Seamus!). I felt very sad to leave and I looked back over my shoulder several times at their small knot of bodies still groaning over the loss as I walked back to my hotel alone at three in the morning to fetch my bag for the airport. Funny how being alone after being so thrown together in such solidarity with other people (even with strangers) leaves one feeling even more isolated, quieter.

I said I wasn't going to post this picture
of myself... but it reveals too much truth...

Then my first week of French class, writing, shopping and long hours at the writing desk that this lovely family installed for me. I keep the heat low throughout the house, wear my fluffy blue bathrobe, sometimes doubling up on scarves. With just my little head visible over the top of my robe, I look a bit like a bloated, fuzzy Smurf.

Which is why I decided I needed to leave the house on Friday night. The problem is that it is very difficult to leave the house when it is so cold. There is no new snow, but the little that has fallen (nearly two weeks ago) dusts about in small piles and refuses to melt. Even when the sun blares all day, the wind and the hard temperatures are only enough to make tiny dunes of the thin sheet of flakes that cover my little back yard.

Café des Halles, Brussels

Anyways, I put tights on under my jeans and waited for the late night tram to take me into the heart of downtown. On the way to the bars by the Grand Place, I walked through the Rue des Bouchers where a young, dark-haired man wearing a chef’s vest stopped me and referred to me as "princess" throughout the conversation. I paused in that blue and green lit neon walk for a moment to talk with him (what minute can't I spare when there is literally nowhere that I have to be). He brought me into the restaurant that he ostensibly owns and gave me a glass of champagne and then took me outside to the heat lamps, produced an ashtray and we smoked together. When I said goodnight, trying to make a graceful exit out of a lie that I have to “go meet a friend,” I headed towards an area that Bri and I visited two weeks past and find a bar that claims to be part café, part dance hall, part art gallery and find that it is indeed a lovely venue.

Café des Halles, Brussels

It looks like a converted railway station with high sweeping iron beams that hold up the domed roof. The walls are brick with intermittent columns supporting the three levels that wrap around the whole room. There is a fountain at the center of the room as well as a sweet-looking DJ who I glance at throughout the evening. My young-looking server is charged with the sad task of conveying notes on pieces of cardboard boxes from a gentleman at the bar that I never quite see that gives me his number with scribbled Sharpie messages in French. He sends me a drink and later on a genial New Yorker takes a picture of me and ends up telling me about San Francisco and himself. And despite the trip out and the pleasant conversations, I still feel rather lonely. Not at all the Irish camaraderie I had so enjoyed less than a week before. But without an itinerary, agenda, or anyone to answer to, I was able to select my chances for myself. I treated myself to taxi home and jabbered with my driver in awkward French. That counts as practice for French class, right?

My benefactors here have a daughter that lives in Brussels and after a few missed connections, we had finally made a date for Saturday afternoon. And despite the cold, we decided to spend the afternoon taking a walk around the pond in the Bois de la Cambre.

Bois de la Cambre, Brussels

Charlotte, tall and willowy with wildly bright eyes, is an actress, comedienne, singer with a concert coming up at the beginning of the month. As two wool-wrapped artists on our own for the first time, we ended up going over a lot of our troubles with art, our giddiness for it, the personal trials associated with it. At intervals she would point things out to me: a red-throated robin, blocked off areas of the ice where skating was forbidden, large rock archways, and the small island at the center of the pond. She gently corrected my French as we walked. And even though the wind had bruised us blue by the end of it, I was surprised when I looked at my watch and learned that we had been talking for nearly two hours. We ended up in a café with our hands cupped around two warm bowls of carrot soup accompanied by thickly sliced bread and small flowers of butter.

Chez Charlotte, Brussels

Afterwards, we went to Charlotte’s place with a brisk walk along the sidewalks of Brussels, peopled with families out with strollers and men with their newspapers and girls with high boots. Her apartment is in an old town house style that would have once housed only one well-to-do family, but is now split into three floors of one bedroom apartments and the whole thing begins with a high and green-as-grass front door. We go up two flights of stairs and arrive at Charlotte’s apartment which is the ideal artist apartment – tastefully decorated with antiques, cards from friends and flooded with light from the high windows. I look across the street at all of the other buildings in the old Belgian style standing at attention, shoulder to shoulder and wonder how someone couldn’t be inspired here. I imagine that every flower box at every window along the street is the home of a poet, sculptor or dancer. And we continue to talk all afternoon long.

Is there anything better than making a new friend? Meeting yourself again for the first time and wondering what you might look like as you puzzle over an unknown French word? It is perhaps the greatest joy of traveling by yourself - you find out not only who other people are, but who you are as you get to know someone who has absolutely no sense of your past. You carefully unpack yourself for the first time in good long while and find out what you're really carrying around with you.

And so I find myself alone this Valentine’s Day. And yet, untroubled by that fact. Even with the Bise Noir blustering outside my window.

Full-size Chocolate Orangutan, Brussels
(I think the only thing that would make the Belgians
happier is if they could have made it out of beer)

This weekend, I also visited a chocolate shop with another friend – the premiere artisanal chocolaterie in Brussels: Pierre Marcolini. Of their highly varied selection (saffron, violet, rose, anise) one of their offerings is a tour around the world in a box – through chocolate. Each tiny truffle represents another country: Venezuelan chocolate, Swiss chocolate, Belgian chocolate, chocolate from Ecuador. I bought a box for myself and find myself this evening up late after too much coffee eating through a tiny voyage around the world. One of the best ways to travel solo.

Forever 25

If you’d please be so kind as to bear with me… This is a longer entry… I’ve broken it up into sections for you if you want to read smaller portions throughout the work day without feeling like you’re cheating too much on your employer.

People might tell you that you can’t put a price on a generous compliment, but it turns out that you can. The cost is approximately 110 Euro ($140 USD).

Bri and I arrived early at the train station this past Thursday to board our train for Paris, tickets purchased from a lackluster, bilingual ticket agent boy and pocketed. We arrived early, boarded and settled down.

About a half an hour into the countryside with its green hills in the drizzly mist punctuated by Cypress trees, a brusque ticket agent stopped at our row and requested our tickets, which he processed and then asked for identification, which he looked over rather snootily.

“That’s going to be 55 Euro,” he said.

“No, we already paid,” I explained – pointing to the little bill of sale.

“No, this is a ticket for someone who has less than 26 years. You cannot have the youth price.” We looked at our orderly tickets with the word “Jeune” stamped traitorously at the bottom of the page.

“So, it’s 55 more Euro?”

“For each.”

“FOR EACH?”

“Each of you. Each way.”

Thanks Thalys – that’s about $263 total for a two-hour train ride that we weren’t anticipating. We huffily paid out and bemoaned the doubling of our expenses, but with a twinge of conceit, we both realized that it was rather pleasant to be mistaken for 25-year-old girls traveling through the country on a student visa by our ticket agent, even if we couldn’t fool the attendant on the train.

It turns out that the cost of a bus ride is about a quarter of what it takes to travel by train between Brussels and Paris. And rather than spend the supplemental 55 Euro to get home, we decided to stay an extra day in Paris and attend a dinner party with some friends on Saturday night and save some money on the ticket home.

Lose five years on your age, gain a day. We decided there’s nothing wrong with being “forever 25.”

***

When we arrived, we followed the instructions that John had emailed us and made our way from the Gare du Nord to the West side of the city where John lives. After a long bus ride with adorable old women jostling for position with their many bags and hauling our carry-on luggage around behind us for several blocks, and a tour through some beautiful, old romantic buildings, we arrived at John’s apartment and shed our bags before heading back into the heart of the city, desperate for food.

So far, at the center of everything in Europe for me, is food. I am a slave to my local patisserie. Even if I exercised every day, religiously (as I surely won’t) there is no way that I won’t gain weight on this trip. I’m in love with dessert, with chocolate, with pastries, with tiny piles of salad and rich appetizers. The other night I had a raspberry meringue tart, the meringue gently toasted and so light and buttery and fluffy that I swear it was more marshmallow than cream. In Brussels, Bri and I stop frequently at chocolate shops and look at their well-ordered selection with a shy sort of greed.

The other night when Bri and I ventured out into the city for our tour of the old quarter, I sampled (for the first time) one of the traditional Pralines – one that has a history that is over 50 years old (invented for the world’s fair in 1958)– the praline’s name was Caprice. It was a chocolate-wrapped nougat filled with vanilla fresh cream. That recipe pre-dates the Beatles, 80’s shoulder pads, my birth, Sesame Street and more. And I thought about it in the days following, wondering what other dangerously-titled foods I might sample.

I also didn’t realize that chocolate was such a recent development in Europe, really. The cacao bean itself wasn’t even discovered in South America by natives until 2,000 years ago (does that mean Jesus never tasted chocolate?), but Europeans didn’t get their first taste until the 17th century when Spanish explorers came back and started making hot chocolate for the nobility at court. Belgian chocolate didn’t come of age until the 18th century and it wasn’t until the past century that Belgian chocolate distinguished itself from the rest of the chocolatiers. It was actually Jean Neuhaus who invented pralines as these dynamic candies that could take on a variety of other flavors (coffee, hazlenut, raisins, etc.). And Belgian chocolatiers are fanatics for quality in a way that the automated corporate industry could never appreciate. In an age where everything is mass produced to meet demand, Belgian chocolate (true Belgian chocolate) is still made by hand. Another distinction is that while most chocolate companies receive their shipments of chocolate in solid form as bars to be reheated when necessary for their recipes, I read that Belgian chocolate companies receive the tempered mixture of cocoa, sugar, and butter in heated trucks and the warm tempered chocolate retains aromas that cooled chocolate just doesn’t have.

I have to remember that during my time in Europe I’m on a budget. I cannot be as capricious as my chocolate wants me to be. So I have been making a lot of meals at home. In fact, I’ve only eaten out for four meals the whole time that I’ve been here which is well below the average when I’m at home. I’ve had lasagna, quiche, casseroles, pastas, quinoa, cassoulets. And they’ve all been made by people’s hands.

“It’s funny,” Bri said on the way back from the market the other day after we had purchased breads and soups and other things for our evening meal, “that a trip to the market in Europe can make me feel so indulged.”

It’s true. I don’t feel the same after shopping at Safeway as I do after shopping here. At the outdoor market, there is no self-checkout stand. I speak to a person who tells me different ways that I can fasten and wear the new vest that’s being purchased. I am pointed in the direction of the nearest bank by a helpful shop keeper and even the cute bakery boy wishes me a good afternoon in English when he notices my trouble with the currency. It’s human and colorful and personal. When selecting food for the evening meal I can look down a row of hand-picked produce and ask the girl to give me a head of garlic while delicately testing out the word for one of the first times: “l’ail.”

It’s hard when you’re on your own and a bit lonely and you’re floundering a bit in your late twenties, wondering what life really is since it’s not everything that they told you it would be – it’s hard not to fall in love with your food. This thing that pulls the day together from three sides, like a ribbon around the things that make you feel good, that reminds you what’s pleasurable about life, that ties you to the entire tactile experience of touch, taste, sight, smell, even sound as the meal comes together – knives chopping on a board, onions frying in a pan, glasses and dishes assembling on a table. It’s the best part of the physical world in some ways.  

***

In Paris, Bri and I settled for tourist food a few times since our proximity to certain monuments didn’t leave us a whole lot of options, but I also bought pain au chocolat and croissants with fruit salad for our morning breakfasts. John also took us to his favorite restaurant Les Bougresses where we sampled a salad that was topped with a large toasted crouton filled with goat cheese and drizzled with raspberry vinagrette, where we each sampled each other’s desserts, where thinly sliced vegetables were arranged in a petaled pile at the center of my plate with little crevettes all around the periphery and the slightest hint of a sweet balsamic vinegar.

We walked the Champs Elysées in Paris without purchasing a thing. We visited the Eiffel Tower, both at night and with our pre-purchased tickets the next glorious day. In mid-January, there aren’t as many tourists as the various monuments and historical landmarks around the city, because you have to gamble that the weather will be acceptable. When Bri and I woke up on Friday, the sun was already blazing and for the entire eleven hours that we traveled the city, we weren’t cold.

We stopped at Notre Dame, we considered visiting the original Chanel, but my favorite area in Paris has always been Montmartre, with its peculiar little side streets that lead you uphill and take you past surprising, but small vistas with a view of the city like you’re in the clouds, so Bri and I agreed to head to Sacré Coeur before the sun set.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do love Paris, but it’s probably not my kind of city. It’s dirty, and brusque and in a totally different way than New York. But in spite of all that, when I imagine the place that I’d like to live, I think of an apartment on Montmartre, to the East of the Sacré Coeur, somewhat at a remove from the rest of the action, but if you strained perhaps, you could still hear the calliope of the merry-go-round playing at the base of the steps. Bri and I picked out just the building – an old pink apartment with hanging baskets of flowers at its windows, stooped little roofs, and a tiny veranda where one could watch the sun set over the Eiffel Tower. We told each other that when the time came, we’d move in there together with our cats.

We spent the rest of the afternoon abandoning all of other tourist plans and simply wandered through the area: window-shopping at boutiques, buying my new favorite skirt, watching painters in the square behind the church imagine rain on the cobblestones that we were standing on. We watched a pack of children running up the hill after being let out of school for the week and took out our journals in a little café with a loaf of bread on its sign. It is a reminder that sometimes the best introduction to a city happens when you put away your maps, sit down, and find Paris at the bottom of your demitasse of café on a dead end street lined with wrought-iron gates and broad-windowed apartments.

***

The next morning we woke late and spent some time just bumming around John’s lovely apartment listening to Who’s The Boss? dubbed in French while we typed, ate croissants and recovered a bit.

Then we set out into the city for a walk through the flea market and then the Père Lachaise cemterery. There, we visited the graves of Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Jim Morrison, and Fréderic Chopin. We wandered the long avenues of the sprawling, many-tiered cemetery in virtual anonymity since the cemetery was so vacant in the January drizzle. The very modern marker for Oscar Wilde is large and clean and is now a historical landmark surrounded by plexiglass that is covered in the pink lipstick of kisses left for the poet. It is obviously a much-frequented destination, but my favorite part of the grave marker itself was the excerpt from one of his poems:

“And alien tears will fill for him

  Pity's long-broken urn,

For his mourner will be outcast men,

  And outcasts always mourn.”

Jim Morrison’s grave is wildly unassuming, almost shoved in amongst the many other crypts and markers which only makes it seem all the more tragic. But, I think my favorite grave, was that of Fréderic Chopin. I have often imagined him as a character in one of my poems or stories – a little tortured, very human, never getting over George Sand even until his death and wanting his heart removed after he had died because he had a fear of being buried alive. He sounds neurotic and approachable and he made such dynamic, complex little compositions. As we approached his grave, I saw one old man under a gray umbrella gently arrange a rose in a single glass of water on the lip of his grave and stand back to look at the bust of the artist’s face for a long while. I wasn’t impatient for him to move away and waited until the man at last wiped off his glasses and moved farther along down the path.

If you are lost in your life a little bit, if you don’t know exactly what course you’ve put yourself on and you can’t see far enough down the road to where you’re going, you are sympathetic to people who mourn men they never knew for the art that they gave to us. The shared sadness that can span hundreds of years somehow seems like a comfort, if not an answer.

That night John brought us to a dinner party hosted by an American couple that he knows in Paris. I put on my new skirt, some beads, a shirt with high shine and regarded myself in the mirror: passable for a fashionable adult, even by Parisian standards. When John’s friend R arrived to ride along with us to M & C’s apartment, I answered the door full of anticipation for making friends with a true Parisian and kissed him lightly on each cheek – always unsure of how much pressure to apply, how much cheek to offer, how much my lips should turn towards a stranger’s face. In any case, we managed the greeting and handsome and slight as he was, I could immediately see that he was both funny and shy.

We all piled into John’s American car and tunneled through the crowded traffic of the city on Saturday night. We were in high spirits, warm in the packed little vehicle listening to the music of Kanye West as we careened around the large rond points at the Champs Elysées.

We arrived at M and C’s apartment – both professionals living in Paris (one a consultant/writer, the other a technology person). Their apartment was five floors up at the top of an old building in the Marais with a long city-sweeping view to the Eiffel Tower which twittered with sparkling lights every hour on the hour. They took our coats, complimented our clothes and smiled the whole time until, before I know it, a glass of wine is in my hand and we are all admiring their new microwave in such close proximity to one another that I’m surprised I’m not at all self conscious.

They had prepared an Italian themed meal with numerous little appetizers: foie gras, cheese tarts, spinach puffs and two different kinds of cheese to go with their crackers. They brought out a salad they had discovered in Sicily: an unexpectedly pleasant combination of oranges, onions, and Cayenne pepper that later introduced a simple greens salad. Pasta with red sauce and bread from the same market that Sarcosi buys from and then pear-chocolate tart for dessert. I might have busted out of my new skirt while their large orange and white cat strolled all around the table in a mute interrogation of the houseguests.

At two a.m., I realized however, that what was most pleasant about the evening for me was how I felt in that room full of deliriously affable people – many of whom were strangers. As M poured out another limoncello and C laughed genially as he blushed over a French curse word, I realized that I wanted to have this again, what they have, what we were having. To be a little bit older and still stylish, to be shifting through different languages (Italian, French, and English) with a group of people principally concerned with laughing, making each other feel comfortable, and the pleasures of a good meal. I would like to invite someone like me out on a night like that and keep her talking well past her bedtime and make her feel at home. I’d like to make her feel comfortable with herself again, even if she’s stretching the seams on her skirt, I’d like to talk about homemade limoncello while pouring a glass of it and discuss a particularly good book. It’s surprisingly overwhelming to meet one of your possible futures and live there for a minute. If you’re looking for it (or even if you’re not), if you shift slightly to the left of the center of your life, you can end up under the broad skylights in the roof of an apartment saturated with the sound of unrestrained laughter and you can meet yourself… even (or maybe especially) in a strange city.