place Carnot

1

I am standing by the window. It opens onto the small balcony of my hotel room. From the pavement below I hear the sound, the bustle and movement of crowds.

I am looking to the room across the street. Every now and then figures move behind the pulled curtain. Their outline is vague and blurred in the peach of the hanging fabric; shapes sketched by the light from the ceiling. As I watch, as I listen, I think of her.

Four mornings ago when I arrived the city was quiet. It was just after seven when I stepped off the train.

I walked thinking it was too early to find a hotel. I had a couple of hours to kill. My first impressions were of the white of the buildings, the soft colours of the paintwork, the strange emptiness of the yet unpeopled streets.

The sun was rising then. It climbed up over the houses on the hills in the distance, finding its way in over the roofs, glinting here and there in the mirrors of cars parked alongside pavements.
In the coolness of the morning I shivered. I felt the change after the warmth and stuffiness of the train carriage in which I had been travelling all night. I opened my bag and pulling out a light jacket, put it on.

I wondered then what the city would bring. I wondered why I had marked it on my map. Why, when the previous day I was planning the last part of my journey, I decided on a detour. Why it prompted my curiosity.

I first saw them standing in front of the 1st class section of the train - a little further up from me. They were carrying two large suitcases that they set down carefully on the cool stone. As they stood looking about them somewhat confusedly, I noticed her shiver, noticed how he stood a little away from her. His hands were in his pockets; his eyes were narrowed and wary.

I walked toward them and heard him say in English, he was thirsty, that he could sure kill a cup of coffee. She looked down and opened a small bag hanging from her shoulder, took out a mirror and began to put on lipstick. As I passed she was applying it to her lips. She looked up, caught my gaze and smiled.

I was a little way beyond them when I heard a voice call out. For a moment I thought it was for someone else. Then I stopped. I looked around and saw him wave, walk quickly up to me and, his eyes flickering a dark grey, say ‘you don’t happen to speak English do you’?

I replied that I did but was not able to help them. I explained it was my first time here. I too was just a traveller and I was also looking for a hotel. I added I thought it should be possible to find something in the vicinity of the station.

Pausing, I watched him stride back to where she was standing and shake his head.



2

The following morning while sitting on the terrace of a cafe they came in. I was putting a roll of film into my camera and heard the seats across from me being moved. As I glanced up she was sitting down, the same small bag held out in front of her, her short blond hair falling over her face. I noticed her eyes seemed a little remote. I felt almost immediately she was annoyed at something.
I watched her, watched her put her light jacket over the back of the seat, watched her smooth out her skirt and then cross one leg over the other. And I remained like that. Observing the breeze ruffle her hair, her pale arm against the cream of her blouse, the concentrated light from the table softening the tones of her skin. It was only when I heard the other voice, heard him ask if a black coffee was alright, I looked away.

He was standing behind her, under his arm a newspaper, in his hands two cups. His hair, still wet from the shower, was brushed back smoothly off his forehead. There was a tiny scar marking the line of his jaw.

She answered without looking at him. Her face remained impassive. She said nothing. Instead she reached into her bag and pulled out a paperback.

He put the cups on the table, sat down quickly, his mouth set in a thin line.
I did not want them to notice me looking. I felt awkward; felt I was staring impolitely. Something inside me said it was better not to interfere. Yet I could not but admit I was curious.

I put the cup in front of me to my lips, I finished off the last of my coffee. I called the waiter over and was just getting my change when I heard his voice. At first I thought it was the waiter he was addressing, but no, as on the previous morning, he was speaking to me.
“Hey, did you get fixed up with a hotel. We found one not far from the station, but the other station. There are two here. Did you know that? How about you?”
I returned my wallet to my pocket. I was already standing up.
“Yes thanks, I managed to find something. It’s a small but comfortable place near the Place Carnot”, I replied.
It was too impolite just to walk away and besides, I was wondering if she would again smile at me the way she smiled the previous morning on the station platform.
He turned to her and said to look; it was the guy they had met yesterday, the guy who had not known where they could find a hotel.

She glanced up, her mind seemingly still on the words she was reading and stared at me. For a brief moment she frowned and then her eyes flashed a vague recognition.

As her lips softened into a smile, as I watched the way her eyes suddenly wrinkled in the corners, the delicate bridge of her nose, I found myself with a strange sense of familiarity.

He motioned to me to sit down and have a drink. I did not really want to. I had already decided how to spend the day. He turned to her. She leaned over and removed her coat from the vacant seat. He saw me hesitate, gave a wide grin, all his teeth showing, his eyes steely and asked would

I like another coffee, maybe a beer

She nodded her head, sat forward in her chair, closed her book carefully and placed it on the table.

I felt embarrassed, felt it would be rude now to refuse but also saw my plans for the day disappearing. He called the waiter back. I sat down.



3

The following morning I met them again. It was she who saw me, called out to me as I was coming from my hotel. I crossed the road to say, hello, and when she asked what I had planned for the day, I had to say, nothing.

He began talking about how he wanted to drive around a bit outside the city, how he hoped maybe to see some of the famous small towns of the region. She suggested I come with them, that it would give me the chance to see a little of the surrounding countryside. He looked at her blankly for a moment and then said, yes, why not. I arranged to meet them in the foyer of their hotel. (We discovered we were staying across the street from one another).

When I arrived he was already there, pacing in the foyer. As we stood waiting on her he complained about their room, saying it was too small, that it was cramped, that it cost more then it was worth. I shrugged and replied it was always the chance you took, it was always a matter of luck if you were not well acquainted with the city you were arriving in.

Eventually she came down the stairs. We turned and began to walk the short distance to the car-rental agency.

It was a sunny afternoon, the clouds sparse and pearly white. She was wearing a light blue blouse, a loose red skirt and a pair of white tennis shoes. As she walked ahead of us on the street, I found myself following the faint tan of her legs, following the fluid way she seemed to move over the pavement. I think he noticed this because he suddenly asked me why I was travelling alone.

I explained I was on a trip. I had recently ended a relationship and felt the need to get away, to spend some time alone, some time travelling. I told him I had taken the opportunity to bring my camera, that I had decided to see it as a chance to build up my stock of images.

He looked at me with a puzzled expression and then answered, his voice suddenly vulnerable, that you never really knew where you were with women.

It was surprising he picked up on the end of the relationship. It was surprising the perplexity that suddenly appeared in his face.

I wanted to reply that sometimes it was something else. Sometimes it had to do with the unsaid expectations people had of each other, the secret images we have of ourselves and others. I wanted to say it is easier to look outside ourselves, to avoid looking at a situation as it is, easier to persist on seeing a situation as we would like it to be. Instead I simply said, ‘perhaps’. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his khaki trousers. We walked in silence.

When we reached the office there was a misunderstanding about the car rental. She stood outside with me and we listened to him argue, heard him raise his voice and watched the older man behind the desk shrug his shoulders, gesticulate with his hands.

I squatted down on the pavement, opened my camera bag and looked to see what lenses I had. He came out, swearing under his breath and turned and said to her that they would not charge it to his credit card, wanted him to pay cash.
“Goddamed foreigners,” he suddenly exclaimed, asking her if she could lend him some money.
I felt embarrassed and I think she did too but she said nothing.

As we drove out of the city he began to sing to himself. He wound down the window and stuck his arm out it. She sat next to him, her legs stretched out in front of her. Opening her bag, she took out a pair of sunglasses and the paperback she had been reading the morning before.

I sat in the back. The air from the open window blew in against my face. The city slipped away behind us.

After a while he leaned over and turned on the radio. He asked if either of us knew if they had any decent music in this country. He fiddled around for a couple of minutes, switching rapidly from station to station, until finding nothing to his liking, he turned it off again with a grunt.

I watched as we drove. It was impossible not to notice he was a rather careless driver. On more then one occasion we had to break hastily as he attempted to overtake into oncoming traffic. She sat reading, her eyes moving patiently across the page, now and then wetting her upper lip with the tip of her tongue.

He looked back and asked me what I thought of the city, Lyon, the countryside around it. I saw him fix me in the rear view mirror as I answered it looked good to me. Without waiting for any further reply, he launched into an account of where he had grown up. He told me it was still the most beautiful place he had ever been. He described the mountains, the forests, the sheer scale, the sense of nature untamed. He added you could build a couple of highways through it, but it would still only be a dent in its wildness. His eyes lit up eagerly as he told me how when you left the city you could drive along the highway and come to a town and there would be the neon of the seven-eleven, the shopping mall, the diner, the fast-food chain, and yet you felt its isolation. You felt in someway that underneath it was something lonely, something blue and doggedly determined. When he was forty-five he was going to pack everything up and go and live in one of those places.
“Build myself a house, buy one of them off-road vehicles and go fishing when I want”.
At this she lifted her eyes from her book and looked at him. Then she turned to me.
“Dreams,” she said. “He’s just dreaming. He couldn’t live for forty-eight hours without the excitement of his work, his TV, his fax, his luxury apartment, all the things that go with life in a city”.
He glanced at her and then lifting his hand in the air, brought it quickly down as if sweeping her words aside.
“No way, just you watch me, I’ll do it. And what’s more you’re coming with me”.

I already knew what he was doing in Europe. He worked in Paris as a shares-trader. He had a one-year contract with the overseas section of his company. It was there he met her. She worked for an English company that had just started trying to make inroads into the French market.

To me, she seemed the more settled of the two. I was not surprised to learn she was older. He laughed at this, winked at me and said, “yea, but what’s age when you’ve got experience”. She did not reply.

Watching them, I could not figure out where the centre of their relationship lay. There were times when she appeared displeased at things he said, hurt by his straightforward manner.

The previous morning in the cafe I felt she was upset. She was subdued, quiet. I felt her to be almost trying to shut him out. When I sat down she was at first somewhat distant. As we talked she eventually became lighter, showed herself to be curious, to be interested.

I observed her sometimes look at him with tenderness, as if looking at a boy, someone who needed special care. To my eyes it was this he liked best; he needed the attention.
As we drove these thoughts went through my mind. I put my head back against the seat and relaxed. She remained immersed in her book. He hummed to himself, now and then cursing other drivers as we sped through the countryside. From the corner of my eye I saw the fresh green of fields, rising hills, and above us, a sky soft and blue.



4

Yesterday evening I met them at a point along the river. There are actually two rivers running through the city; two that meet here, that join and flow together, enriching the land around, rolling gently southwards through wine country before entering the Mediterranean.

It is strange to think of the sea so far inland yet somehow, even at this distance, there can be a sense of its presence.

He complained of having a headache. He was feeling nauseous. He stood leaning out over the languidly flowing water. They had been driving all day, had gone as far as Grenoble.

We were supposed to eat together. They had booked a table in a nearby restaurant. Suddenly it seemed unlikely.

At first he was uncertain about it, appeared puzzled when she suggested there was no reason for me to eat alone, that she could still go on with me. Then he grinned and said, ok, of course, what the hell, he probably only needed some sleep. Maybe he could arrange to join us later. We agreed on a café.

We found the restaurant and sat down. I was hungry. All day I had been taking photographs. I had walked around much of the city, the camera tight in my hand, the lens ready, the shutter on standby looking for anything that caught my eye, anything that remotely piqued my curiosity. The mixture of old and new, the contrast and contradiction, the peculiar sense of two cities, one underneath the other, was intriguing.

I watched her as we waited to make our orders. She seemed strangely dreamy, to be there and yet somewhere else. Her hands rested on the table, curled and apprehensive, her fingers thin and delicate. There was something about her, coiled and aloof, as if withdrawn yet consciously so and capable of sudden intensity.

I asked about her day, how she had found Grenoble. She replied it was interesting but they did not really have time to see much. Before I could say she could always visit again sometime, she looked at me, stared straight into my eyes and asked me about my photography.

In truth I felt slightly taken aback by this sudden interest. I wondered if she had been hiding it, wondered if it had been there all the time, if it had been in the background but that when he was around she refrained from showing it.

I told her a bit about where I had gone during the day, about some of the things I had seen while wandering around, about how the city had revealed itself as somehow binary, as existing in different layers, as somehow paradoxical.

She was interested. She put her hand to the side of her face and listened attentively.

When I finished, she smiled, saying she would like to see some of the photographs sometime if that were possible. For a moment, I thought of saying more, of telling her not what I had seen but of the strange manner in which I had seen.

I wanted to explain to her that in some ways it is the uncovering of how I normally see I enjoy most. Often the camera seems to indicate to me to another dimension of where I am. In the simplicity, the details, in the act of looking at what I look at normally without being aware I am looking, but then being aware of my looking, it seems I come close to another understanding of the world. When I was a child it was also like this.

Often I took my father's camera and placed it to my eye. Then I would walk around the apartment we lived in, or along the street, or through a park, or by the seafront. It was like being a different person. I would feel I was looking from outside in, that the world had become contained in the images appearing within the viewfinder. Even then I sensed these images were only ways of narrowing down the picture. They had been plucked out of the whole picture. The whole picture was too big, too complete for the eye, for any camera.

Sometimes I wonder if this is not a reasonable representation of how life is. I realise I never see the whole picture, that all I ever see are the glimpses, the shots, the images that suggest its completeness, its complexity. I realise that if I were to see it all at once, I would be swept away. It would destroy me. It would be more than my mind could contain.

Those moments when I experience myself as part of the whole picture are the moments when I am concentrating on only very specific parts of the picture. By isolating parts of the complete picture its existence is amplified, its tangibility increases. Contracting it to the nature of a series of simple connections, the totality of all other connections is implied.

It is similar to noticing the footsteps I make in the sand when walking along a beach. I stop and examine the pattern I have made and gaze back and see its form, where it begins, where it ends, where I stand making it even as I turn, and see where it will be washed away by a change of tide, or blown over by wind. I realise that what I call loss is simply a working of the interweaving of life’s complexity, its macro effect on a micro level. There is no loss. Only non-knowing of my participation in living, my continuing involvement in existence. The sand is still there. It has only altered its configuration and is waiting for other steps, other patterns. It is the forming and re-forming that defines me, not the pathway I temporarily make.

The waiter's voice interrupted these thoughts. The run of the conversation was somehow broken. I felt it inappropriate to continue, to add anything. I remained silent.

For the rest of the meal we exchanged small talk. Occasionally we discussed our impressions of the country, her work, or the merits of travelling by road or rail.

When we had finished we argued about who would pay. We compromised, each paying a half. Calling the waiter over, we settled the bill and stood up to go.

I waited a moment as she put her jacket on, fixed her bag over her shoulder and then stepped ahead of me onto the street. Watching the lightness of her movement, I remembered the previous afternoon when she walked along the sunny pavement and he asked me why I was travelling alone, when I felt he was marking out his territory, claiming what he considered his.
The air was warm and humid. I came up beside her and said I thought it might rain.

We passed under trees, thick and fragrant, all in full May bloom. We came to a square with a line of benches, open. It was surrounded by stately, grey buildings. As we crossed it I felt my resistance weaken.

I asked her about the book she was reading. She glanced at me, her face breaking into a teasing smile. Looking at me carefully, she told me it was the story of a woman who had travelled alone through India.

I watched her as she talked, watched the way her eyes became animated, the way she threw her head back, the manner in which her voice suddenly started to linger over words. I wanted to ask her if she had any special interest in India, had she always wanted to go there. I was curious to know why she had chosen the book. Did she always choose books about journeys, or about women, or did she just read what came before her.

Again I felt I should say more, attempt to explain myself. Stopping, I turned to her in the evening light. Her calm, blue eyes looked into mine. I leaned forward, was on the brink of kissing her when I felt her tighten. She moved as if to step back a little. The look in her eyes, the expression of her mouth, told me she was still seeing me through the window of their relationship. I knew it better to let it pass. Reaching out my hand, I simply touched her on the arm. I reminded her we had arranged to meet him, that we needed to start getting back.

We walked then in silence. We found the river and headed along it, following its slow wind, its lazy, stretched-out movement. I heard the sound of bird song, the occasional burst of activity in the spring-scented trees above us. Her steps were light and I wondered if I just imagined she walked with a little less certainty.

Before we reached the spot where we were to meet him, she stopped and put her hand in her bag. She took out a pen. Discovering that she had no spare paper, she pulled out the paperback and tearing the blank back page out, wrote an address on it. She handed it to me, saying she thought he was planning on leaving the next morning, that he still wanted to go to Geneva before they returned to Paris. It would be nice if maybe I could send her a copy or two of some of the photographs I had taken while here.

I agreed and we started crossing the street. He was sitting by the window of the cafe, his head half-hidden by a financial newspaper. There was a tall beer in front of him.

We paused to let a trolley-bus pass. Its green and white shape came between us and obscured our view of him. Suddenly she leaned up and kissed me briefly on the cheek.
Then we were on the other side of the street, stepping onto the pavement and pushing the door in front of us in onto his questioning gaze.



5

The storm held off all night. I left them after half-an-hour and came back to get some sleep.
About six this morning, I woke to feel the humidity ease, hear the rumble of thunder and then the hammer of the rain against the roofs. It fell hard against the side of the building. I got up and went to close the window.

Pulling on a t-shirt I stood and watched the drops beat against the railings of the balcony, watched them sweep and pour down the empty street. I stood until they died down, until there was just the occasional flicker of lightning, until I could hear only the run of water along the edge of the pavement.

Most of the day I have spent just walking around. This morning I took some more photographs, went back to some places I figured I still needed a couple more shots of.

Around midday he came over to tell me they were going to Geneva. He stuck out his hand and said if I was in Paris within the next couple of months to look them up. I said, ok, and then with a cheerful goodbye, he abruptly walked away.

This evening I ate alone. I drank a coffee on the terrace where I first met them. When I had finished I wandered back to the square where I listened to her yesterday evening, where I stopped and almost kissed her. I sat and watched the birds dart among the trees.

Perhaps it is right I should be standing here. Perhaps when I leave tomorrow morning, I will look back on these couple of days, will see a line running from my arrival to my departure. I will sit in the carriage as the train makes its way out through the suburbs. I will feel the footsteps fade, feel the glimpse of the picture slip back into its disconnected patterns. The images I have will settle back into moments, into memories.

Somewhere she will be reading her book on India, reading about the poverty and heat, the vast subcontinent with its great variety of landscape, of life. He will be beside her talking loudly as always, eager to be somewhere, tapping his foot impatiently.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. May 1996.