'Membering by Clarke Austin;

Author:Clarke, Austin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

My host is a professor. A Frenchman. He is the man who told me to meet him in the Bordeaux train station; that he will be under the sign, Pont de Rencontre. I did not meet him under that sign. I met him under another sign outside. Men’s toilets. He was lost. He lives in Bordeaux. I met him under a sign that said these other things. It turned out to be the public urinal.

Driving me from the train station, with the water on my right — river or lake or sea? — certainly a harbour, with ships that look like luxurious hotels, or like castles built on water, to cross over the Atlantic Ocean, carrying the new “slaves” of pleasure back to the Caribbean, to sit on beaches and turn the body over one time every fifteen minutes, to face the sun and turn it the colour of lobsters, and turn the pages of a fat paperback novel, which make us admire this scenery, and wish we were on them. It is almost Mediterranean in its beauty. The light that the artist depends so heavily upon, hits these buildings, and the hotel-boats, in the same way as it lands on the green-door house. These Bordeaux buildings, matching in magnificence the palaces in Venice, and the dilapidation of the Malecón’s architecture, are built from the same blue print of a disposition, from the same state of mind.

“There is a house in Toronto with a green door,” I say to the professor. “The way the light hits these buildings we are passing, reminds me of some on the Malecón, in Havana. It makes me feel I’ve been here, before. And I know I have not been here before. In a different sense. But I also know I have been here, before. There is something about the light, and the way it strikes these buildings. There is something about this light, and these buildings. They make me think of Venice. I bought the house I was telling you about. And I added a green awning over the green door.”

And then my host, the professor, said, without prompting, something that took me by surprise for its frankness. I was shocked also because of its presumption that he could, and did, read my mind. He said, in the most non-dramatic voice, “These buildings you’re seeing, all along this way, are the profits from the slave trade. We in Bordeaux admit it, fairly openly. But in Toulouse, where you’re going after your lecture here, they are a bit more embarrassed of their past.”

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