TheTraveler

 

I Dropped My Biscuit Atop the Arc de Triomphe
By Doug Pelton

Five hundred feet below the small window from the Convento dei Cappuccini a train pierced the tunnel rimming Monterosso’s ‘ old town: ‘Thrump…thrump,’ like an unending sentence punctuating the rhythmic folding of waves rolling in from the Liqurian Sea.

Yesterday, we’d left Villefranche-sur-Mer, having spent three nights in that Riviera nirvana where Elton John and Bono are purportedly neighbors somewhere in the Nice-Eze region (Think they travel now with a Rick Steve’s rucksack on their backs? )

Nor did they ever encounter, I’m sure, the Mother Earth lady we met one morning outside the Villefranche Tourist Information office: Poetess and painter, she befriended us as we were gazing off at a hillside vista.

“Did you find the way up there?” she said in a Lauren-Becall-like voice.
“Straight as the crow flies,” I said, startled now by her sudden presence beside me.
“You don’t want to go up there at night.”
“Not safe?”
“The couples change partners.”

I decided not to invite her on our picnic.

She told us she’d been a ‘head shrink’, and that her husband took off with all her money. She went on to learn five languages, she said, shaking her head, as though her brain was overwracked with sentence structure and idioms; thereafter, a friend encouraged her to paint with a gift of thousand Euros to set up her studio.

“I sold my first piece for the Brazilian Hunger Relief organization for $25K Euro. My studio’s not far from your hotel. Come by after 2:30 if you’d like. No need to ring the bell. Just call out my name.”

We said good day and headed to a deli, then to a park for a picnic before entering a maze of streets we thought would magically guide us to the hillside spot we eyed earlier.
Not to be: We topped out far from our intended destination, but we were rewarded with a stunning, roof-top panorama of Nice and the Mediterranean below --- according to Earth.Google, we were somewhere between Elton John’s hangout and Tina Turner’s hilltop estate with Bono’s yacht bobbing in the harbor behind us.

We gave a moment’s thought to stopping by the artist’s lyre on the way back into Villefranche, but rain hurried our downhill return to the Hotel Welcome, where we settled in for a mid-afternoon cup of tea with ‘Villeroy & Boch’ and watched the people move to and fro along the waterfront. Our wall companions had celebrated their own visits to this Riviera village: Sir Winston (Leonard Spencer) Churchill in 1950; Errol Flynn, 1951, and Henry Ford II, Jack Warner and Dean Martin’s wife, Jeanne.

But they couldn’t hold a champagne glass to the harbor’s aged ‘net maker,’ working his spindle and nylon coils daily from his post along the quay. He was an anachronism here along the Riviera: An old-world ‘roper’ plying his craft of ‘retaio' in a new world setting.

It was early morning, the day we left for the Cinque Terra, that I grabbed my camera and notepad and walked out the hotel to the harbor front to watch this sea-faring character at work with no other people nearby.

His skillful, heavy hands worked rhythmically, hooking lengths of nylon around a a peg anchored to the net bin.

His smile grew shoulder wide as I approached.

“No Englisha,” he said.

The water was calm this morning, he ‘signed.’

I pointed to a small fishing skiff motoring past us and asked if he still fished. He was too old, he said, laughing as he tugged at his thick gray hair.

He knew of Los Angeles and the ‘Pacifica” and salmon. He worked on ships out of Quebec and Montreal and even knew the Great Lakes region.

“Family?” I asked him. He shook his head and shrugged.
"Ships,” he said, resuming his motion of hand, nylon and spindle.

---
"He went like one that hath been stunned,
'And is of sense forlorn :
A sadder and a wiser man..”
---

I lingered, then offered an ‘au revoir. He nodded, those heavy hands in sync, to some ancient rhyme:

"Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea !
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony."
- Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge

Today, in Monterosso - it was May, the month of the Lemon Festival - we were on our first leg of a two-day trek along the seven mile stretch to Riomaggiore, the last village along this Riviera coast. Our agenda: Vernazza for lunch, and then on to Corniglia, and then catching one of the hourly trains back to Monterosso, where the beatific peace of the Convento dei Cappuccini awaited us. The next day we would train to explore Riomaggiore before setting out on the ‘The Via dell'Amore,’ a walking path carved out of the hillside rock linking Manarola in what would be a mere thirty minute stroll.

It was raining as we left the Convento for the jaunt down into Old Town, the gateway to our Vernazza destination – it turned out to be a ninety minute walk. Heading up out of the village, the path was slippery, but soon we we’re stopping to take in the cinematic views of coastline and beaches.

We never once complained about the intermittent showers over the next two days of our hiking in sacred sanctuary of primitive beauty.

A missed train from Genoa to Colmar and a brief stay in Eugesheim led us on to Salzburg and Paris for our second stay at Hotel Leveque on Rue Cler in the 7th Arrondissement, where in the coming days we would sit outside the Café du Marche’ for long spells.

And it was there I watched the elderly lady. Her steps were heavy, measured and skillful. Her body was bent almost parallel over her cane as she treaded heavily up the cobbled-stone street, bread peaking out of her market bag .

The next day atop the ‘Arc de Triomphe,’ I bent over to fix my sandal, and as my morning biscuit fell from my shirt pocket, I thought of the lady on Rue Cler , and of the netmaker working his heavy hands as he dreamed of days long ago aboard ships on mighty seas.

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