The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban

Author:Russell Hoban [Hoban, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: U.S.A., 21st Century, Amazon.com, Retail, 20th Century, literature, britain, American Literature, Expatriate Literature, British History
ISBN: 9780747561637
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2002-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

I remember all there was.

Solange

Nineteen Octobers passed, and in the twentieth I wished to see the Christ of Saint Lazare again. I desired also to hear the bells. I went without Victoria, without Jean-Louis and the Rolls-Royce. I went alone as a pilgrim. Taking only a rucksack, I walked from my house in the Avenue Montaigne to Franklin D. Roosevelt, where I took the RER to the Gare de Lyon.

There in the daytime it was like a labyrinth of the night. There were many large young people with backpacks as big as steamer trunks and many old people with trolley bags. I already had my ticket and seat reservation, so I went to Platform 13 where I found the 12.34 to Marseille and Saint-Charles. This train would stop at Chagny, from where a bus would take me to Autun just as it had taken the two of us long ago.

I boarded the second-class coach and went to my seat. Soon an old lady was ushered in by a young man who kissed her and left. The old lady smiled and sat down opposite me. She settled back with closed eyes for a moment, then took a computer game out of her handbag and began to play. Only one other passenger came into the compartment, a very abled-looking young man, powerfully built. He took a DISABLED seat by the window and peeled an orange.

I closed my eyes and gave myself to the journey. I had no wish to relive old times; I wanted to stay in the present October to receive what new thoughts might come to me.

I opened my travel book: Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey, an English edition. Closing my eyes again I saw the rustlers’ cavern behind the waterfall and I saw Bern Venters shoot the Masked Rider, who turned out to be a beautiful girl. He tended her wound and took her to his hidden valley. ‘“I’ll try — to live,” she said. The broken whisper just reached his ears. “Do what — you want — with me.”’

The train was moving. We glided under gantries and wires, past coloured lights and signals of various kinds. Through zones of bleakness we passed, then through human habitations. Sometimes files of poplars marched rearward beyond the gantries and the wires while TGV trains shot by us like thunderbolts. Strange towers and stretches of flatness appeared and disappeared; haggard landscapes, rivers and canals. Graffiti on walls, bridges, and power stations offered illegible messages, some perhaps for me.

Were there so many electrical towers nineteen years ago? Birches, poplars, and willows tried to remember Claude as they struck wistful poses: ‘Was it like this?’ they said. ‘Was it like that?’ The paper sign on the outside of the window said MARSEILLE backwards over sky, trees, hills, valleys, farms, rivers, boats and bridges. At Sens there were little trees on the platform with straight trunks and round leafy tops that might have been done by the Douanier Rousseau.

As we travelled on I found myself looking within more than without.

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