Valence

The cities of the Rhone are more or less all the same, once you get south of Lyon.  The light certainly is all the same, a pale yellow or ochre or dirty creme (depending on the time of day) falling on traces of Roman walls and streets of the old quarter where names like “Grand Rue” mark out lanes which narrow into pincer points.  Outside of the historic bits, the light remains harsh and yellow, but falls instead on southern French suburban sprawl, boxy concrete houses with roll-shutters on the windows that seem never to open.  Finally you reach a ring of big box retail stores with names that make no sense to North Americans (Geant Casino?  Piccado?) and then almost immediately the fields and vineyards and orchards begin.  There is no gentle shift to the countryside, and only there does the light change into something less angry, something you could imagine inspiring paint and music.

They have the appearance of cities, even if by today’s standards their population barely qualifies them as biggish towns.  They are cities by virtue of the spirit that founded them – proudly on a hill, or on a cliff over a turn in a river, signaling to the Romans that here, indeed, would be a city, a place which commanded its nearby villages and which would convince merchants to stop and put up a stall.  Dozens of them, rolling down the Rhone valley towards the oldest of them all, Marseilles, the only proper city left, really.  All the rest have fallen into provinciality and, with the centralizing tendency of the Revolution and the Republics behind them, into the role of a place where Parisians can sample the first sun of the south on their way to holidays on the beach, or maybe buy a place for their kid to live in while they attend one of the second tier universities here which crop up as urban renewal projects dreamed by their Parisian bureaucrat friends.  In America they would be fading fast or else become absorbed into exurbs; here, though, they persist.

Tonight it’s Valence for me, coming in on the train after a long flight from America, stopping by for an evening on my way to the Ardeches.  My room is on the top floor of a classic building which only exist in Mediterranean countries – huge spiraling staircases wrapped around a cage elevator, leading on to apartments with grand wooden doors and, behind them, 12 foot ceilings, a few grand sitting rooms, and then a small warren of tiny sleeping chambers.  The French built their homes for accepting visitors, not really living.  It’s comfortable, though a bit close – upper floors keep their heat, and the windows do little to circulate the air.  I’m not sleeping, as my body is telling me it’s only five in the afternoon, jet lag and cloying warm summer night air conspiring to keep me awake.

I can’t decide whether I like this or not.  It is foreign – and thus charming – but it’s also foreign and upset, not foreign and friendly.  The light seems tired of itself but it also has no intention of changing, indeed the light feels like it realizes that it needs to change but it absolutely will not, it cannot, it has not reached the critical point where it will finally succumb to the need to change.  But it knows it needs to change.  And that’s what makes the place feel upset – this dissonance of knowing that there isn’t a real point to this place any longer, but it’s here, and it will not move and will not simply shrink away.  Even as it shrinks, it will not do so willingly.  For me, the foreigner, this dissonance is harsh.

I’ve been to Valence a few times in the last couple of years, and each time it’s been before visiting a spiritual advisor of mine who lives an hour away up in the mountains.  I’ve come here before both alone and with a girlfriend (who introduced me to the advisor), and each time I’ve been knocked slightly off-center by being here.  I’m only realizing this now, but it makes going to see my advisor a bit daunting at this too-late hour.  Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be recovering from this short stint in Valence, the city’s quiet jarring complaint still ringing in my bones and my blood, without enough sleep, and then I’ll be plunging into a scouring of my soul.

After getting off an early train, I picked up my rental car at the station.  I was early, and the agency didn’t have the Ford hatchback I was looking for, so instead they gave me a new Mercedes, immediately making me feel like a jerk.  The locals all drive compacts, most of them ten years old; the new German cars are for the Parisians (and the Belgians and English who imitate them).  I reprogrammed the car to be in English, which dramatically improved my odds of surviving the week, figured out the odd keyless starter and transmission , and drove into town – luckily my flat was just outside the old city, because there’s no way the Benz would fit through the ancient streets.  I found my room, got some directions, and then headed out for a walk.

The streets were quiet but not deserted, with mostly teenagers and old people out for a stroll, fighting off the boredom that is common to the old and the young but usually held at bay by the middle aged, taken up with their very young children and their worries about paying off debts and preparing for being old.  The sky was dark and it rained heavy drops every now and then, never quite reaching the downpour that the sky clearly wanted, but the light was still that yellow and ochre color.  Even a midafternoon purple sky couldn’t quite counteract the effect of old stone, whitewash, and the smooth golden pavements of a southern interior French city.

After an hour or so, getting a bit sweaty, I headed back to the flat, and realized I had left the keys to the flat in my room.  I didn’t want to bother my landlord, who had said she had to visit some friends, so I went for a drive to kill time, attempting to find a tobacco store (“ou est le tabac?”) to buy cigarettes.  It being Sunday, very little was open other than service stations – and it being France, service stations don’t sell cigarettes.  At one service station, a woman stopped me as I got into my rich Parisian car and asked for help.  I told her I was American, and she switched to broken English and made it understood that she needed help inflating her tires.  So I walked with her to her car and helped, my knowledge of roadside assistance overcoming the odd metric measurement of air pressure.  We had a nice conversation, she wished me well on my holiday, and off she went.  I was puzzled why she asked me for help, but it paid off for her, so I guess her instincts were reliable.

I found a tobacco store on the way back into town, finally open after their long afternoon break, bought my pack, and headed back.  I waited another hour or so for a decent interval to elapse before texting my landlord for help, and she met me at a bar in the old city square.  The owner knew her and exchanged some knowing remarks (probably about her idiot American tenant, which I deserved), and she gave me a second set of keys.  Flush with success, I had my supper and then headed back to the flat.  I read a bit in the front room but heard the sound of a band, and looked out onto the Champs du Mars to a free symphony concert.  I had seen the setup and some signs earlier, but it hadn’t clicked in my mind that there was a concert that night – the long flight must have muddled that part of my brain.  I headed across the street.

The orchestra was visiting from Hungary, and playing pre-World War I marches.  Radetsky’s March was their finale before the encores, and while none of the other tunes were familiar to me, they were all from that same moment of bourgeious pop music in the late 19th century.  A bit martial, a bit sprightly, oozing optimism and yet totally devoid of depth, the marches were written at the same time that Tchaicovsky and Rachmaninoff were revolutionizing the world, but these populist marches blithely ignored anything edgy or new or meaningful, happily inspiring children to play at cavalry even as machine guns were already prepared in the trenches.  And yet, the early 21st century audience – now a mix of old, young, and middle-aged, some neatly dressed and some not, plenty of children bouncing around but quite a few tattoos and piercings, too – all reacted enthusiastically and unironically, enjoying the free music on a warm Sunday night.  Most everyone clapped along in steady, 1-2 white person marching time for the most rousing bits.  Even the teenagers: I poked around the concert afterwards, expecting to find the inevitable clusters of kids smoking pot and up to no particular good, but mostly the teenaged clusters were streaming out of the concert area where they, too, had listened to the best the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s court composers could dish up – admittedly, probably on their way to get high and do no good, but for a few hours, they had listened to the marches like the rest of the town.

Will the teenagers end up staying here in Valence?  Earlier, as I had my beer and waited to text my landlord, the square slowly filled up with people in their teens and twenties.  They divided neatly up into two classes, which you could discern by their shirts: the ones wearing faded black too-tight t-shirts, and the ones wearing either brightly colored too-tight polo shirts or clean t-shirts with sweaters casually tied around their necks.  As the dinner hour came, they were joined by two classes of middle aged people: packs of families in flashy clothes with several children in tow, and smaller clusters and solitary middle aged singles, the women looking hard and the men like they are on the take.  Valence, despite the complaints of its light, is reproducing itself.  20 years from now, the young people around the square will also gather in the park and listen to marches, and the square will have a new generation.

As I was having dinner earlier, I noticed a small commotion among the workers at the gelato store next door.  The glacier had been recommended to me by my host as being a top spot in the area – people driving south would make a special stop just for this gelato.  The workers were all in their late teens and early twenties, all slim and attractive and with just a hint of disaffection, the type of thing you find in people fortunate enough to work in a well-known establishment.  A friend came riding up on a bicycle with a large sack on the back, balancing four sodas – he was delivering McDonald’s, Big Macs and fries for everyone.  The staff dropped their disaffection and displayed a few moments of unalloyed bliss, the same kind of happiness their parents and grandparents would show to the lilting strains of Viennese fin-de-siecle later in the evening.  Yes, these people will stay in Valence.  They will build good lives and be reasonably happy, especially on warm nights in July when gelato and a hamburger both taste their best, and the finest music is the free kind being played in the town gardens.

The light slowly faded as the concert drew to a close, and much of the anger of the atmosphere dissipated with it even as the warmth continued to radiate from the stone pavings.  The murmurs of the crowd seemed to hold the upbeat rhythm of the marches that had just been played.  Valence’s citizens walked back to their flats and their cars.  It was a bit mystifying to me, the American, trying to reconcile my earlier sensations with the banal, chirpy cadences of pre-World War I military music.  No one seemed perplexed by how the sonic power of the city’s daylight was so completely at odds with the evening’s playlist.

I thought about where I come from in New England, and I realize it’s much the same there – people repeating the routines of their parents with a slight change in rhythm, staying close to where they first learned the light and sound of being alive.  Only the light back home is different.  The light doesn’t have any brown in it at all; it’s all crystal blues and primary greens and yellows and in the fall, red.  The light where I come from isn’t tired yet, and shows no signs of wearing out.  It hums a tune with words in a language no one speaks anymore.  Although as I think of it, New Englanders don’t really listen to that sound any more either.

Most of the other places I’ve lived have been the places that attract the people who don’t stay behind in Valence and Portland.  The places where people buy Mercedes, and drive through or fly over the other places on their way to their holidays.  The light in those places is harsh and deathly quiet.

I made my way back to the apartment, taking the old cage elevator in the dark up to the top floor, and made my way to bed.  It’s not that I like Valence or don’t like it – but it’s uncomfortable.  It’s like being in a place where someone is shouting a warning all the time, at the top of their lungs, but has been doing so for so long that the locals don’t notice it any more – only foreigners notice it, and to point it out would be tactless.  The light is too angry and no one is paying attention.  Which, maybe, is my first lesson on spiritual retreat.  Pay attention.