We were in some kind of canyon in the south of France in the summertime, watching a jazz fusion band perform. A steep rock wall with boulders piled across on which spectators sat with their blankets and picnics. We were up around the top I think. With our sad-ass ham sandwiches. We might even have accessed the space from the bluff up above, not from below by the stage. It was hot as fuck. I was maybe seven or eight. How did I even know there was such a thing as jazz fusion? Do I remember it that way now because my brain connected what it had perceived of the music with later knowledge? I don’t think so. I always knew what this music was on some level. Tedious, disappointing. I saw everyone up on that stage with their bell bottoms and electric guitars with the phone cord cables and the synthesizers with all the buttons and knobs and I thought we were getting rock and roll. Big Led Zeppelin rock and roll. But instead we got bleeps and bloops and major seventh chords and elliptical, acrobatic solos that are supposed to take hold of your brain, and maybe it was someone great, maybe it was Weather Report. But my young mind wasn’t having it. I retreated to my default position of sullen boredom and restlessness. On a long, hot car ride before AC the plastic of the Evian bottle would seep into the molecules of that weirdly smooth, bland mineral water and that’s all you had to drink.

Adeline the AirBnB manager showed us around briskly, garbage is through that door over there, someone left a popsicle in the freezer and you can have it. Keys, shower, towels. The washer’s here and the dryer’s there. She said a woman thought the dryer was the washer and put in soap, wide eye roll, what a disaster that was. Try to clean soap from a dryer, I am telling you. I’m here for you entirely, je suis entièrement à votre disposition, she said before leaving in that way French people say things and you know they don’t mean it.

We ate at our favorite place that night, the two sisters, and clumsily I asked if they have ice when there was ice obviously in the drinks so the younger sister looked at me and smiled and said of course we have ice, exclamation mark.

The air conditioner appeared to work and then it didn’t and I stood below it for half an hour, working the remote, putting it on fan only and back again, turning it off, turning it on, dialing the temperature down in desperation, Googling the force reset and the meaning of a blinking green light. I futzed with the vent by hand, knowing it was a bad idea. Finally I gave up and went to bed. In the early morning I had a happy dream I was somewhere that an AC worked. When I awoke Sara told me she got up at two o’clock when it was way too hot to sleep and pressed the button and it worked and it never stopped working after that.

I was inattentive and unadventurous for most of the trip, losing at online chess, leaving the freezer door wide open. I tended toward the uncolorful gelatos, the salted caramels, the chocolate family, though I knew the fruity ones were better, the mango and the passion fruit. But maybe this is what vacation is. A respite from trying.

How I love to watch the Tour de France, not for the racing but the scenery, the nothing restaurants in the middle of little towns, the glorious mountains and waterfalls, people perched on steep hills, almost tumbling into the road that’s painted with riders’ names, a family of five wearing polka dot jerseys, the details.

The Cat From Iran

When I was a kid we drove across France in the summer of 1979 in that Renault 4, the heat merciless on the rainbow-striped synthetic seats. An odor of glorious vomitude. Hollow metal poles formed the frames upon which the fabric stretched, ready to tear, ready to pop in a fender-bender, a serrated end ready to plunge into the firm neckflesh of a ten-year-old: me.

Dad had the radio on and the French people do love their news. Music, news, news, news. Weather. News. Traffic—vacation traffic. Live reports on the jam you’re in right now. Music. News, news, news, news, news. They kept talking about this cat. A cat was fleeing to France. To live out the rest of his days. This cat was on the run. From some kind of danger. Who was this cat? This cat from Iran?

Summer is the time for sickly drinks: white beer that tastes a bit like puke; thin, acidy rosé. These aren’t my favorite drinks but they must be drunk abundantly in summer.

We took the bus back down to the beach after dinner, to go to Funny Land. A big family got on, grandmother, mother, kids. A loud, misbehaving girl; a quiet, sweet one. Another with a wooden leg. I wondered what their lives are like.

While floating in the calm, salty water at Villefranche-sur-Mer, not quite warm enough to put you to sleep, I had a memory as I gazed up at the rocky hills, dotted with stucco villas and trees. It was about cutting someone off in a way, in a car, or maybe not—I saw a diagram of it in my mind. Something involving some Italians. It was combative,  contentious. But it never happened—did it? What could it mean? Or did it happen in a dream?

Election Night 1981

We arrived at our hotel by cab, in the middle of the day. There was a light rain falling and everywhere people clutched roses and embraced each other. Laughing, crying.

After we checked in we went back out and met a family friend for dinner. The daughter of my parents’ friend. The grown-up daughter.

We took a walk toward the river where a crowd had gathered. The bridge was closed and a band played courtesy of the communist party. Drunk dancers whipped each other ‘round, chanting “Mit-ter-and! Mit-ter-and!”

The family friend stood next to me and I stood next to her. She asked me to dance.

I placed my arms around her timidly, tremblingly. We circulated for a little while in the mayhem. Celebrating victory.

Was it 1975?

It was summertime in the south of France, or was it Switzerland? A jazz-rock fusion band was playing down in a sandy valley below steep, rocky slopes where we sat with the rest of the crowd. We had a picnic—ham sandwiches, peaches, Evian water in the corrugated liter bottles, everything the same unappetizing temperature and smelling of the plastic of the insulated cooler bag that was in the trunk of the car for the past three hours.

I was worried we might fall off this jagged boulder and tumble down, gashing our heads and breaking limbs.

The men in the band looked like dolls down there in flared pants, silk shirts, bandannas. Strange, angular sounds bleated from their speakers and I wished somebody would sing.

The First Time I Heard About the Disaster of '55

We sat at a round dining table covered in lace, somewhere in the middle of France. These were friends of my parents—was it the family my mom had stayed with as a student? Or someone else they’d met along the way? We were forever criss-crossing the country: Paris, the south, Provence, the Alps, Brittany, the Pyrenees. Who the fuck knew who these people were. I can’t remember.

They were older—older than my parents—which befit the exquisitely bourgeois surroundings. The fine china displayed in cabinets along the wall, the flowered wallpaper, the Louis chairs. There must have been a grandfather clock somewhere.

We were there to eat cake. A classic French cake with meringue and cream and lavender. It was not very good, in my opinion, as it contained no chocolate. But it was sweet, so I ate it. I don’t know why we didn’t eat lunch. Just cake. Maybe we’d arrived too late, stuck in traffic on the autoroute.

Someone mentioned the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The man wistfully recalled the race in ‘55. A car slowed on the track and Pierre Levegh struck it. His Mercedes took flight and tumbled along the stands, disintegrating as it crushed and tore asunder dozens of human beings.

I gripped the silver fork and thrust it into the violet icing. The meringue resisted a little bit—you had to press hard. When it broke, the layers shifted willy nilly. Soon, crumbs and cream covered the floral pattern along the perimeter of the plate. I was afraid I was not elegant enough for this.

Notes Written Upon Waking Up About a Dream I Can No Longer Remember

Dad restaurant on the road in France, other people (young), hospital with severely depressed person?

I’m often drawn back to the race we saw in Rouen in 1977, my dad and brother and me. The wooded setting, the sunshine, the small Formula 2 cars in brilliant colors, bearing the logos of obscure sponsors and racing down the hill past us into a canyon with tall, grassy banks—it all formed a kind of unexpected paradise for me. So I’ve researched it, and found pictures of the event, and pictures of the obsolete track today, dilapidated and overgrown.

Today I found a Super 8 video. It had that hazy, beautiful color, and that slightly jumpy feel that Super 8 has, that really makes you feel you’re peering into another world. I wondered, will I be able to squint and see us in the stands? With any luck I’ll see someone who looks a bit like my dad and probably isn’t, but I don’t have to know for sure. As I watched a scene in the pits before the race, in which the eventual winner Eddie Cheever was talking to his crew, my dad walked right on screen, staring vaguely at the camera, with my brother right behind him. My brother looked like my mom. I was there, but invisible.

Peering out from our balcony onto the Promenade des Anglais I saw the usual nighttime parade of pseudo-rich younger couples trying to make the scene or something, of vagrants and mediocre musicians, of tourists like us. There were two little fucking fountains erupting from somewhere on the sidewalk, or maybe from the island in the middle of the street. I couldn’t tell whether they were meant to be functional—to water the palms and those shrubs with the pointy leaves—or decorative. Or maybe it was the water main. No one seemed to notice or care, anyway.

We are staying in a vacation apartment on the water in Nice. It is clean, modern. Unlivable.

Behind the kitchen faucet there stands a bottle of dish detergent whose brand name is the Soviet space station that fell to earth.

The Pickpocketers

Twice in France they tried to pickpocket me. The first time, I was walking up the metro steps in Paris. I must have been carrying Jackie in her stroller, holding up the handles as Sara held the front. I felt something on my ass. A feathery, faint sensation I might have ignored had it been momentary. But it persisted, deliberately, for two seconds or so, and I understood. I swung my arm around behind me, feeling nothing. I patted my pocket, felt my wallet, and looked for the thief. There were two people, I think, one to either side, a woman to the right, a man to the left—I think. They appeared absolutely oblivious. Neither looked up at me. Neither betrayed a bit of guilt. Was the man reading a folded-up newspaper? I don’t know. It couldn’t have been either of them—could it? Was the criminal somehow among the two or three others, further down the stairs? Or had he disappeared completely?

The second time, we were walking up the streets of Nice to the train station, hurrying for our train back to Cannes. I was carrying Jackie. There it was again, that telltale, wispy feeling. I turned around and pushed my wallet back into my pocket. Behind me were two very young boys, maybe 11 or 12. I lifted my right hand, Jackie still cradled in my other arm, and prepared to slap one of them—the one to my right, closest to me, who evidently had done it—across the face. He lifted his arms above his head and mumbled a vague plea: M’sieur… non... His face bore a mixture of insolence and shame, the Fallen Angel’s grimace. I hesitated. I did not strike him.

“Salaud!” I yelled. I turned back around and they ran away.

My dad was driving a white Peogeot 202 on a hilly road in France, through the fields, between the trees, on a hot day in July. My brother sat in the passenger seat and I sat in the back. I was five.

I stared at the speedometer needle, urging it higher with my mind. It said one hundred nineteen kilometers per hour. One hundred twenty-three. One hundred twenty-seven. This was the highest I had ever seen it go.

We found a spot on top of a dusty little hill of beaten dirt and gravel. Behind us was a trove of trees. A little way down men stood along a wire fence, clutching the mesh with their fingers and peering through the diamond gaps. I stood between them and saw what they saw—an unpopulated expanse of patchy grass, rolling up from the left and back down over the horizon to the right. It was bisected by a ribbon of gray asphalt, edged in white. Two low barriers of corrugated steel traced it, from a remove, on either side.

I looked left, where the asphalt bent away beyond a hill. A candy-striped lip of concrete sloped up from the inside of the curve and extended a few feet in the grass. In the distance the track rose again and disappeared around a corner to the left. I looked right. A man in a white jumpsuit, backlit by the sun, stood on my side of the metal barrier, facing away, his left fist resting on his hip. Beside him was a bright red fire extinguisher.

I heard a sound I’d never heard before. A low, mechanical moan, reverberating in the hills and growing louder. I looked to the left, from where it came. Suddenly: a swarm of shiny, sleek machines appeared, in rough procession, some alone, some side-by-side. They settled into single file and snaked up the little hill to where I stood. The one in front was red. The sound rose and rose and peaked as the cars passed me: the red one had a 12 on it and then there was a black one with gold letters and a black number 1 on a golden square and then there was a white one, a blue one, a red-and-white one and another black one, and I was surrounded by noise and I could feel my stomach quaking, and with each car the sound changed; it faded quickly, and lowered; it became the sound of disappointment, or pity; a sound made again and again and again.

In a little while the cars came back around the bend, and again, and many more times after that; sometimes in a different order, sometimes the same; one at a time or in groups of two or three, and finally there was no interruption in the din. Some of their wheels were silver; some were painted. I liked the painted ones. The prettiest ones were painted green.

I got lost in the cars. I turned around and I was lost in the crowd, the forest of grownup legs. I saw rocks and dirt below me, some grass. No faces. No Daddy, no brother.

The cars were very, very beautiful and very scary. I wondered: Could one of them hurt me? They were so beautiful and scary. Beautiful things hurt you the most.

In my memory La Ciotat, the town on the French Riviera where we spent summers in the early ‘70s, is small and compact, like the town in a children’s book: a road leads down from our house and suddenly you’re on the beach; take a right and you pass some cafés and hotels, a marina, a rocky cove where you can fish or dive or even tie a boat. A little farther off there’s a shipyard, set apart in a maze of docks, where one enormous oil tanker sits on stilts, its hull in patches, as unseen workers pound it with their hammers to break it down for scrap. Clang! Clang! Clang!

I looked at the satellite photo of it today in Google Maps. The coastline conformed plausibly to my image of it but the town itself was vastly more complex and sprawling. Roads in all directions. Schools, museums, parking lots. Major avenues leading into roundabouts and squares. I tried in vain to find the road we lived on. It could be this one, or that one. None seemed the least bit familiar. They all were too urban: heavily populated and girded with infrastructure.

Did the town develop that much over time? Or did my imagination tear it down?

A creased photograph of a dreary street appeared on the luggage carousel, between suitcases.

We're back in France, the country that smells of coffee and perfume and sweat.

In a review in the Times about some bigass new book on Modernism, the reviewer makes the great point that "In France, civilization is invincible and eternal." This is to contest the author's view that somehow conditions in France at the turn of the 20th century bred the types of outcast that make ideal Modernists. In fact, it is the condition of France always that creates such vigorous artistic and intellectual movements. Because French civilization is "invincible," there is no hope and therefore also no fear of ever changing it. You can assert or even do the craziest things in art, philosophy, politics, and still go to the café or have a good meal with plenty of wine. If the civilization were any weaker it would be vulnerable to the agitations of the avant garde - it might actually break down into the new forms insinuated by radicals, into some unknown which is in fact terrifying to all, not just the cozy bourgeoisie. So that's really why France is full of revolutionaries of all kinds, always clamoring, taking to the streets, crying out for change. The awesome responsibility of actually getting the exalted, ambitious things they want is never upon them. They're not afraid of winning.

I felt so old and tired at that club on Friday night. The way you feel when you're patronized by children. But they were all quite kind. Putting my bag in a safe place behind the bar and pointing me to it when I turned around to find it gone, and panicked, and pretended not to panic.

I spoke to Rumana and her friend about Little Italy, where they'd been to see the Italy-France World Cup final and where I'd just been with Sara to have a dinner at a tourist trap that was not so bad mind you. The waiter said salud after he poured our wine.

Of course.

Rumana said an African worker at the place they went tried to wear a France journey, I mean jersey, but I'm honoring my mistake as somehow significant, a France journey, the journey you take to France as an African immigrant, a journey you're compelled to wear on your back.

He was told at once by his boss to take it off, which is interesting, but not surprising in the least. Nor is it controversial, nor should it be, but it's interesting.

I spoke to Jim about his twin uncles, one of whom once was a monk and married a woman who once was a nun.

Imagine that.

The French Dream

The French had invested a lot in Zinédine Zidane, in terms of representing France not just in the way all sports heroes make their countries proud but also of representing a certain idea – OK, a fantasy – of France as a well-integrated, tolerant and faultlessly high-minded society. A place where on the rough streets of Marseille the son of immigrants learns to play soccer, and the more he learns the more his soccer-loving patrie encourages and reveres him, and wishes ever more keenly to make him one of its own; and in the glow of this adoration he learns not just to be a great footballer but also to be French. To be reasoned and articulate, civic-minded, formally engaged in his society. And as a man – transformation complete, voilà – he evinces both of these, shall we say, talents in full view of the world.

Call it the French dream.

The problem with this idea of France and this idea of Zidane – these twin fantasies – is that of course being fantasies they are not true. But in some senses they are nearly true, agonizingly almost true, and they are so noble that people may be forgiven for deeply yearning for them to be true, even pretending that they are true, and because for all that strain they still aren't true this state of affairs is nothing less than tragic.

Last November in the suburbs the fantasy of French society broke down and last Sunday in Berlin the fantasy of Zinédine Zidane broke down. In a moment, Zidane was no longer the French man playing the ultimate match of his glorious career, he was the immigrant kid playing a street game in the concrete jungle where he grew up; a place where doubtless milder insults than the one he heard were ample provocation for sharper retaliation than a head-butt to the chest.

But isn't that what made Zidane a great player? His ability to thrive in the ghetto, to navigate crowds of rough-playing street kids – arms, elbows, shoulders swinging – and forge a clear path to the goal? Isn't that what made Zidane a great Frenchman? To come from outside and, with great strain and ruthless determination, to find a way in?

The French dream.

Planting your head in an opponent's chest is not, in and of itself, excusable. Surely Zidane knows that more than anyone else. But can he be forgiven? The question is whether the French can reconcile the two Zidanes: their fantasy of Zidane and the flawed, great man that he is. To do so they must address their fantasy of France. It is not a tidy nation where people of all colors meekly and gratefully aspire to Cartesian virtues. It is a difficult, tumultuous, stubborn place where with a little effort anyone might be heard above the din.

Jacques Chirac's predictable plaudits actually express well what Zidane might hope to someday regain from his nation: "You are... a man of heart, commitment, conviction. That's why France admires and loves you."

The French dream, indeed.