William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

I sit in my room reading for most of the evening. At about half past nine I go out for a coffee. Coming back to the hotel I notice several young girls standing in front of brightly lit shop windows in the Rue de France. Despite the time of year they are wearing boots and hot pants. They all carry umbrellas (unopened) and swing bunches of keys. I walk past them two or three times but they don’t pay much attention. I observe that some of them are astoundingly pretty. Every now and then a car stops, there is a brief conversation, and one of the girls gets in and is driven away.

Later that night as I am sitting on my bed reading, there is a knock on my door. It turns out to be the fat daughter of the hotel manager. He has told her I am English and she asks if I will help her do a translation that she’s been set for homework.

I enrol at the university. This takes place at a building called the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen or CUM as it’s generally known (the French pronounce it “cume”). The building is on the Promenade des Anglais and looks like a small, exclusive art gallery. Inside there is a huge lecture room with a dull mythological mural on three walls. This morning I am the first to arrive and there is a hushed marmoreal stillness in the place. In a small office I enrol and pay my fees. I decide to postpone my first class until the next day as I have to find somewhere to live. A secretary gives me a list of addresses where I can rent a room. I look for the cheapest. Mme. D’Amico, it says at the bottom of the list, 4 Rue Dante. I like the address.

As I leave the Centre I see some of my fellow students for the first time. They all seem to be foreign — in the sense that not many are French. I notice a tall American girl surrounded by chattering Nigerians. There are some Arabs. Some very blond girls whom I take to be Scandinavian. Soon the capacious marble-floored entrance hall begins to fill up as more and more people arrive for their classes. I hear the pop-pop of a motor bike in the small courtyard at the front. Two young guys with long hair come in talking English. Everyone seems happy and friendly. I leave.

Rue Dante is not far from the Centre. Number four is a tall old apartment block with bleached shutters and crumbling stonework. On the ground floor is a café. CAVE DANTE it says in plastic letters. I ask the concierge for Mme. D’Amico and am directed up three flights of stairs to the top floor. I ring the bell, mentally running through the phrases I have prepared. “Mme, D’Amico? Je suis étudiant anglais. Je cherche une chambre. On m’a donné votre nom au Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen.” I ring the bell again and hear vague stirrings from the flat. I sense I am being stared at through the peep-hole set in the solid wooden door. After a lengthy time of appraisal, it opens.

Mme. D’Amico is very small — well under five feet. She has a pale, thin, wrinkled face and grey hair. She is dressed in black. On her feet she is wearing carpet slippers which seem preposterously large, more suitable for a thirteen-stone man. I learn later that this is because sometimes her feet swell up like balloons. Her eyes are brown and, though a little rheumy, are bright with candid suspicion. However, she seems to understand my French and asks me to come in.

Her flat is unnervingly dark. This is because use of the electric lights is forbidden during hours of daylight. We stand in a long, gloomy hallway off which several doors lead. I sense shapes — a wardrobe, a hat-stand, a chest, even what I take to be a gas cooker, but I assume my eyes are not yet accustomed to the murk. Mme. D’Amico shows me into the first room on the left. She opens shutters. I see a bed, a table, a chair, a wardrobe. The floor is made of loose red hexagonal tiles that click beneath my feet as I walk across to look out of the window. I peer down into the apartment building’s central courtyard. Far below, the concierge’s Alsatian is scratching itself. From my window I can see into at least five other apartments. I decide to stay here.

Turning round I observe the room’s smaller details. The table is covered with a red and brown checked oilcloth on which sits a tin ashtray with SUZE printed on it. On one wall Mme. D’Amico has affixed two posters. One is of Mont Blanc. The other is an SNCF poster of Biarritz. The sun has faded all the bright colours to grey and blue. Biarritz looks as cold and unwelcoming as the Alps.

I am not the only lodger at Mme. D’Amico’s. There is a muscle-bound taciturn engineer called Hugues. His room is separated from mine by the W.C. He is married and goes home every weekend to his wife and family in Grenoble. Two days after I arrive, the phone rings while I am alone in the flat. It is Hugues’ wife and she sounds nervous and excited. I somehow manage to inform her that Hugues is out. After some moments of incomprehension I eventually gather that it is imperative for Hugues to phone her when he comes in. I say I will give him the message. I sweat blood over that message. I get my grammar book and dictionary out and go through at least a dozen drafts. Finally I prop it by the phone. It was worth the effort. Hugues is very grateful and from that day more forthcoming, and Mme. D’Amico makes a point of congratulating me on my French. She seems more impressed by my error-free and correctly accented prose than by anything else about me. So much so that she asks me if I want to watch TV with her tonight. I sense that this is something of a breakthrough: Hugues doesn’t watch her TV. But then, maybe he has better things to do.

Almost without any exertion on my part, my days take on a pattern. I go to the Centre in the morning and afternoon for my courses. At lunch and in the evening I eat at the enormous university cafeteria up by the Law faculty. I return home, have a cup of coffee in the Cave Dante, then pass the rest of the evening watching TV with Mme. D’Amico and a neighbour — a fat jolly woman to whom I have never been introduced but whose name, I know, is Mme. Franchot.

Mme. D’Amico and Mme. Franchot sit in armchairs. I bring a wooden chair in from the hall and sit behind them, looking at the screen between their heads. While the TV is on, all other source of illumination is switched off and we sit and watch in a spectral grey light. Mme. D’Amico reads out loud every piece of writing that appears on the screen — the titles of programmes, the entire list of credits, the names and endorsements of products being advertised. At first I find this intensely irritating and the persistent commentary almost insupportable. But she speaks fairly softly and after a while I get used to her voice.

We watch TV in Mme. D’Amico’s bedroom. She has no sitting room as such. I think that used to be the function of my room. Hugues sleeps in what was the kitchen. He has a sink unit at the foot of his bed. Mme. D’Amico cooks in the hall (I was right: it was a cooker) and washes up in the tiny bathroom. This contains only a basin and a bidet and there are knives and forks laid out alongside toothbrushes and flannels on a glass shelf. There is no bath, which proved something of a problem to me at the outset, as I’m quite a clean person. So every two or three days I go to the municipal swimming baths at the Place Magnan. Formal, cheerless, cold, with pale-green tiles everywhere, but it stops me from smelling.

The fourth room in the flat is a dining room, though it’s never used for this purpose, as this is where Mme. D’Amico works. She works for her son, who is something — a shipper, I think — in the wine trade. Her job is to attach string to a label illustrating the region the wine comes from and then to tie the completed label round the neck of a wine bottle. The room is piled high with crates of wine, which she sometimes calls on me to shift. Most days when I come back I see her sitting there, patiently tying labels round the necks of the wine bottles. It must be an incredibly boring job. I’ve no idea how much her son pays her but I suspect it’s very little. But Mme. D’Amico is methodical and busy. She works like hell. People are always coming to take away the completed crates. I like to think she’s really stinging her son.