by Walter Agnew Moore II
31 March, 2002

If you are a man travelling with two women, your job is to talk to all other men.

This is not a problem. I can handle it. Kitt and Little Anna and I are in the early morning streets of Paris 5 minutes walk from Chrissa's apartment where we spent last night. Chrissa's directions to the Metro stop were clear and detailed, and we managed to screw up anyway.

You ever notice how much any given street in Paris can look just like dozens of other streets in Paris? It is truly a work of art.

Well, all we have to do is get more directions to the Metro stop from one of the rare people on the street. We see three or four men down the way, and on cue Little Anna and Kitt step back to let me be Question-Asking Man.

I can handle it. We all three have been working here in France long enough to say whatever we want to say in French. But I could handle it better if I wasn't working off of 4 hour's sleep, a hangover from shutting down the Butte last night, and if the poor man I accosted still had vocal chords.

I say, "Pardon monsieur, c'est où, le Métro?"

He gestures across towards a side-street with his arm and says, "ghar a rgh arg."

Kitt and Little Anna huddle up to me with their enormous packs on their backs, giggling, eyes darting left and right. "Wot'd he *say*, Walter?"

"He said the Metro was right over there, up that side-street. Merci, monsieur."

"Hargh." He nods his head in a violent jerk.

We go down the steps underneath the Art Nouveau ironwork, slide our tickets into the slots at the gates that spit them back out another slot a little bit ahead of you, and wait on the subway by the enormous advertisements that curve over the platform.

Three foreigners with backpacks. I wait for the pickpocket children to come flocking, but this is a little nowhere station, and it's too early. Little pickpocket children are dreaming in their beds still. They have the luxury of setting their own hours. We, on the other hand, have a train to catch to Italy.

The Gare de Lyon is one of the ring of train stations that circle Paris. This one handles trains headed towards the south-east. I am much more familiar with the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est (North, and East), but one huge Parisian train station is much like another.

You have the sandwich stands, the people going every which way, the signs, the rapidly clacking departures/arrivals boards. People stand in front of them, waiting and watching.

I see men wearing yarmulkas. This is not just Easter weekend, it is Passover too. There have been warnings of terrorist attacks planned for this weekend. It takes guts to walk around Paris with a yarmulka.

We are early for our train. We sit at a half-full cafe facing the platforms. There is fresh air, birds flying up near the glass roof. There is no feeling quite like rushing somewhere, getting there early, and dropping a heavy pack off your back when you realize you have time to kill. Circulation returns to tensed shoulders. Little Anna, Kitt, and I arrange our packs in a little play-fort around our table.

Big coffee. The waiter is unhurried and happy. I ask him, "I thought you would be getting slammed, this weekend."

He shakes his head, pokes out his lower lip. "No... most people probably left yesterday, if they were going anywhere."

The people at the next table were working on crosswords. They don't know they dropped their pen. I pick it up and hand it back to the woman. "Ah, merci monsieur."

Our TGV is ready to load passengers. No rush, the seats are reserved. We amble down the track past the sleek train, it looks like a jet-liner without wings. The interior is fairly standard, our seats face each other across a table.

"TGV" means "train à grande vitesse", which I like to translate as "Train of Big Quickness".

A team of sports types with craggy faces walk past our window going to their car. Kitt yelps "Rugby guys!" and does a good imitation of a 14-year-old seeing her favorite boy-band in person.

Anyway, inside the TGV you don't really appreciate how fast you are moving. The train starts slow and picks up speed. Sometimes it goes beside a highway, and you see that you are lapping all the cars, but even then you don't appreciate the speed.

To do that, you have to be outside the TGV, like I was one day on the highway in a bus. I saw the TGV going past in the same direction, and almost before I could say "look at that", it was rocketing through the shadows of some trees like a living creature from a legend. Gone in a blink.

I heard some just-so story about how the state of Texas had spent a lot of money to develop a similar system of passenger trains running in a triangle made up of Dallas-San Antonio-Houston. It didn't get support, so the story goes, because Southwest Airlines stepped in to provide the service instead. I have flown on Southwest, and it doesn't *suck*, but it's no TGV. When did an airplane ever drop you off within walking distance of a downtown club district?

So now, in Texas, you have good old Amtrak. They'll get you to most of the main towns, usually only an hour or two slower than the bus, and only a little bit more money for the ticket. And oh, there's only one train a day. Bus station is that way.

It'd be nice to see Texas leading the way in developing a great train system. It's a cooler thing to be known for than, say, getting publishers to dumb down textbooks.

The TGV streaks us through green farmland, hills, and finally up into the edge of the Alps. We come into Chambery.

I am looking forward to seeing my friends here. They told me to call them. I did. One of them calls me back.

"Walter, we won't see you today, we are going skiing."

"But we are only going to be in town for an hour."

"Sorry, we already decided to go skiing, and we don't want to be late. But call us next time you are coming through."

Sure thing.

Chambery is worth a walk-around if you find yourself there between trains. Across from the station are lots of new cafes and hotels with a scaled down feel to them, like a modern smurf village. If you walk on towards the middle of town, you are treated to a bizarre orientalist bronze sculpture which consists of the front half of four elephants coming out of a central pillar, surmounted by a local boy who made good somewhere in Asia back in the first half of the 1800's. The locals don't remember what he did. But everybody knows the statue, they call it "les quatre sans cul", "the assless four".

Now keep going towards the center of town, the Old Town. This is worth seeing, there are wide streets with brilliant red flowers, flanked by massive gloomy canyon-walls of buildings. Going off *under* the buildings are a network of covered alleys that connect with hidden interior courts, or lead to other main streets.

It is sunny. We have the streets to ourselves. The air is cool on our faces.

The last time I was here, I was digging a broken umbrella out of a garbage can because it wouldn't stop raining. The streets were full of people, including lots of tall guys with crew-cuts. This is where the Chasseurs Alpins are based, the French Army's mountain troops. They have competitions with the Alpini, the Italian Army's mountain troops, who are based on the other side of the Alps. They first competed with each other in 1940, if I am not mistaken, and like most elite units in any army, found that they respected their opposite numbers better than they did other "lesser" units in their own armies.

I am perched on an old stone fountain surrounded by red flowers when the phone rings.

"Hello Waltaire, it is Fabrice. I want to tell you we have a rugby game tomorrow if you can come play."

"I could try, but I'll probably be late."

"Why? It's right here in Amiens."

"But I am in the Alps."

No doubt this will add to my established rep as the Guy Who Will Do Anything to Avoid Rugby.

Time to get back to the station. There are the Assless Four again. Quick coffee in a Smurf Cafe, then dodge under the tracks through the tunnel and come up next to our train that will take us through the Alps to Milan.

This one is not a Train of Big Quickness. It is a Train of Faded Blue Paint Filled With Shrieking Children Going On Holiday With Parents Who Won't Get Them To Settle Down.

Kitt and Little Anna, have reserved seats right in the middle of a pack of screeching imps. There is an extra seat next to them.

"You can sit next to us if you like, Walter."

I look back down the car where my seat number would be. It is filled with calm adults. The only open seat, which must be mine, is next to a tall woman with long sandy-blond hair, brown eyes half-closed, looking back at me with an ironic smile. She has the kind of face that should be seen behind a microphone through the smoke of a jazz club.

"You know, maybe it's simpler if we all just sit in our reserved seats." And I walk on back.

Hi. Hello. She's German. I'm American. She knew. Going back to Venice where she works for an Italian family. Lives on a little island. Yeah, we are going to be in Venice too in a few days. My boyfriend in France blablabla. Hey look, we just left France, didn't we?

Whenever I let the conversation drop, she picks it up again. She speaks a little English. I mangle a little Deutsch. We hit on French as the path of least resistance, and it is a very nice French conversation. We mispronounce words in similar ways. We both come from cultures where you don't constantly interrupt people. It stays even and interesting, and we take turns listening.

Listening. What a voice she has. More like a purr. Yes, definitely a jazz club.

And then I wake up. I don't know how long she has been talking about the Jews. How did we edge off into this topic?

She's going along: "The Jews, you know, before Hitler, they controlled everything. I respect them because they are so rich and intelligent. People don't realize how they ran Germany, but they did. Of course, Hitler was wrong to kill them, but you can understand his frustrations. The regular German people went to die in wars while the Jews got rich."

The flat plowed farmlands of the Po valley streak past us. Barns with rows of poplars.

"Um, I don't know about that not-dying-in-wars bit."

"It's true. The Jews didn't fight for Germany."

"I don't know about other wars, but in World War One they did."

"I don't think so."

"I have seen the graves."

"Well, maybe you saw the graves of a few who were officers, but overall—"

"It was a German graveyard in Fricourt, right off the Bray Road. Where the battle of the Somme kicked off in June 1916. There are about 15,000 men there. They have little crosses or stars-of-davids carved on the graves. Four men to each stone. They also put the rank. Most of them weren't officers. I have been there. You can touch the stones."

Red stones, not polished. Rough to the touch.

"Well, obviously there was some special unit that fought there, to have a majority of Jews."

"Most of them weren't Jewish. But here and there, yes, there were some. They fought too."

"Humph."

The conversation stays polite. We joke about the price of drinks in the snack car. I say "bye" when the train stops in Milan. She is staying on it to go to Venice, so...

I'll be in Venice too in a few days. Who gives a damn what her phone number is.

Kitt, Little Anna and I step out of the train station, and we are in Milano.

I can tell we are not in France by the way people stand and walk. All the tension has dropped away. It is OK to smile. We shuffle around getting our bearings, then we eventually find the right street to the hotel.

Kitt has booked us into a four-star hotel for our first day in Italy, and as the French would say, she "has reason". I recommend this to anyone for your first day in any strange place, even if the rest of the week you plan on camping without a tent.

The Hotel Andreola ain't cheap. But money is for spending. I tip the green-suited bell-boy who wheels our packs up to the suite.

Ah, how we stink. What a nice tub. Italian TV rattling with the volume low while the sun changes the shadows on the warm plastered walls outside in the courtyard. There are those echoes of voices, barely heard, and the clinking of pans and plates from a kitchen down below. A voice will call out. There will be a long pause. Then an answer. Words impossible to make out, all you hear is the lilt.

Yes, this is Italy.

I didn't realize we had all three been napping. The TV is still burbling along low. Cool air is coming through the open window, I feel it on my toes. The sun is almost gone. I have a loud empty place in my stomache.

We all feel hungry. Shoes back on, stroll through the twilight back to the station, and see absolutely nothing open except McDonald's.

Last night in Paris we hoisted our glasses together at the pizza place and repeated after Kitt: "To a trip with NO McDonald's!"

Nobody remembered a map, but right in front of the station is a massive broad avenue leading away to where the buildings get thicker. If anything leads to the middle of town, this is it.

We hike down it. Everything along it is closed. No one is out. A few scraps of paper blow around. This isn't a street, it is a stage set.

And that's when I hear the echoes in my head. I see this street packed with cheering crowds. I see the troops marching towards the station. I see *him*, with his jaw jutting out, standing in a car, headed towards the massive pile of 1930's post-office architecture with them. I see him walking up and down those exact same steps we used, underneath the carved lion-heads and Romulus-and-Remus-with-their-wolf-mother statues.

Obey! Believe! Fight!

I see them loading the trains to take the troops to the ports, where ships wait to set off for Ethiopia, for Albania, Greece, North Africa. The New Roman Empire of Mussolini.

Scraps of paper blow in the night breeze. We walk along the empty parade route, quiet.

In the twisting inner streets, there are still hardly any people. We seem to be going in circles. An empty orange tram rattles by. We follow its tracks for a while and see only closed stores and restaurants. We see a large church that looks Byzantine. We are in the Mediterranean World now. The church has long curves, brick decorations, a dome.

The only thing that stops us from giving up completely and going back to the train station is that we are not quite sure how to get back. Then Kitt sees a couple emerge from a side-street, walking arm-in-arm.

"Let's follow them."

They lead us around more dark streets until we see the lights.

The cobblestone street is full of people. African men selling hand-bags and sunglasses. Tourists speaking different languages. Packed restaurants. Lights. Noise.

We walk up and down this area and come back to the second restaurant we saw, the Sans Egal. They seat us on their narrow crowded porch, and a waitress who could have been a model dotes on us. Maybe she was a model, until she gained those last 10 pounds and started looking like a beautiful woman instead of a stick. I get some sort of steak and some pesto. Model Waitress is worried my pesto will get cold, so she runs back into the kitchen with it to heat it back up. We toss down fizzy water and red wine.

The Milanese have their own style of speaking Italian. I can't even imitate it, but the rhythm is shorter and choppier than you'd expect. As I sip my turbo-powered coffee and hunker up to the table, I keep thinking that the people around me are English or American, from the pattern of their speech. Then I make out Italian words.

Around 11 pm, the streets really start jumping with people. We are already tired. We stroll slowly past the Africans— I need to find some cool sunglasses.

All you have to do is follow the tram-tracks like a trail of bread-crumbs, and you will end up back at the Hotel Andreola.

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NEXT: Part Three: The Five Lands