Here’s Where it All Began, A T-Shirt I Saw (Newsletter #3)
Dear lovely readers,
There is a building facing the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, banded by eager-green palm trees and spring grass, with shutter eyes open wide over a pebble beach that edges the Mediterranean. It has terraced balconies, intricate stonework up the front, laundry waving hello from the railings, and bare feet lolling on tiled decks, attached to bodies reddened with sun. We stare up at this building, then drift around to its side, where the pitch-perfect balconies and their clockwork potted plants persist, rows and rows of interchangeable shutters and goldenrod siding—but not a single person in sight. I blink at it, remove my new 15 euro sunglasses, and watch the layers of life collapse into a single, flat portrait, a singular image: one identical window, repeated over and over again. The side of the building is a painted panel; not art or a mural, but a façade.
So this is Nice! Full and spilling into the sea, flowering and populated with sunny people and their tourist antagonists—but with certain points of flatness, where all of the totality collapses into two dimensions, and I can see the entire portrait all at once, from our three-dimensional world.
The newly four of us wake up on Sunday to boot clacks on sun-warmed stone, the rhythmic ticking of rolling storefront grates yawning awake, scarves swishing and delicate wine glass clinks, a day that has already taken off without us. So we scramble to chase it, wandering in search of brunch, again facing devastating rejection — “We don’t have a table and you cannot wait for one,”—and justifying our departure by announcing that the next restaurant will be more authentic, more beautiful, madly French, and madly in love with us all. Armed with this, we stumble into a wide cobbled plaza, which is being painted into existence by an artist with a soft-bristled brush. This is the painting: A church sits open, struck with the perfect yellow beam of sunlight, its entrance scattered with fragrant palm leaves — a menagerie of red checkered tables cluster in its shadow, flanked by ranks of heaping gelato and cheap leather purses on coat racks, little souvenir shops bobbing with heads. As intended, all eyes rise to the church, its golden glow, its Latin proclamations, its bell tower. At 12:20, the bell tolls interminably, without explanation or exhaustion; when it finally quiets, a cannon explodes and also goes unexplained. This does not faze the rifle-carrying military officers, who gather in front of the church, toeing away palm branches with their dark boots.
We eat: salade niçoise, because when in Nice, cappuccinos, risotto, saumon. The waiter does not approve of our coffee-before-the-meal; he does not approve of Alexa’s and my lack of fluent French, either. The wine glass clinks from earlier crescendo in sound and frequency, tinkling bells—I check my watch and it is still just past noon.
We exit the painting, careful to replace our own dotted figures with those of other fellow travelers heading our way, so the entire scene remains unchanged. We are runaway paint-strokes, making a daring escape to the water—Actually, in the accidental-on-purpose way that travel often unwinds, we find a market we were hoping for, and then through an archway, Owen finds us the Mediterranean. I want to tell you about the market, which was a narrow stretch of stalls and mats, mainly bright produce and lavender, and swaths of potted flowers, and every variety of cured sausage you could imagine and then a few that you wouldn’t want to imagine in your worst dreams. But then the Mediterranean is like a narcissistic lover: it demands your attention. Beyond the market, along the edge of the sea, is a long boardwalk called the Promenade, a downhill pebbled beach, and the ring of the city buildings; we rush through the arch and down onto this beach to sit on the rocks. When restlessness wins over, we go through an elaborate series of endeavors to try and touch the water itself—much more difficult than it sounds, when you want to avoid leaving totally soaked. The pebble banks rockslide beneath us, and we are scrutinized through the closed eyes of the sleeping sunbathers, whose skin is puckering pink and whose book pages are beginning to wrinkle.
According to the internet, there are two places we must see in Nice, and we had inadvertently stumbled onto one of them, this Promenade. The second was looming conveniently toward one end of the boardwalk: a dark green cliffside, inset with a string of stairs and populated with human-made structures that might have grown out of the rock itself: a rotund tower, and a carefully-hemmed in waterfall with a stone pool at the bottom. We go to climb this castle carved from the hill. Because we have no self control, we take photos at the end of every switchback, with the same sweeping view of man-built Nice and the reason it was built, the Mediterranean, side-by-side, but from a slightly higher angle each time. It’s reverse mise-en-abyme; instead of reflecting down into an infinity of incomprehensibility, the view becomes more scrutable with each subsequent photo, flatter and easier to capture in my mind as one complete thing. The view on top of the waterfall, which must be the most sweeping, the most complete, the most self-righteous and collapsed, waits for us to take a photo there, but we never make it up: instead, we linger in front of the place where the water is falling, spritzing us with rainbow mist. Caught by l’appel du vide (I am feeling so pretentious that I’ve decided to just leave untranslated French in the newsletter), Owen accidentally knocks Ariana’s sunglasses off the edge of the terrace, but they find their way back to us.
We decide to wander, and then we decide we are thirsty, and then we decide we are hungry. Crêpes! They are easy to find and easy to eat, simple and sugary and warm. In the warm afternoon, we indulge: meet two other Brown students for coffee and pastries, past 4pm. Don’t tell France, but I am disappointed in the patisserie. It’s most likely a problem of idealization; if the country is meant to have the most decadent, the freshest, most irresistible, most French version of the thing, then how can I enjoy any single manifestation? The ideal croissant is nowhere, because it does not exist, but still in my mind it exists in France, and should be behind every bakery glass. So I am disappointed. I’m more satisfied, though, by the other French ideal: sitting out in the sun around coffee and bread and words, and curling up the later afternoon like a cigarette to smoke long and slow as the sun starts to drop.
Maybe all we did was eat? Only an hour or so more and it’s time for dinner, the best meal we ate in all of Nice. Ariana and Owen dazzle with their French; Alexa chimes in a few times; I say: “la daube niçoise pour moi”. We order wine and we eat bread again and there are four mirrors bracketing our table such that we also constantly perceive ourselves having a perfect night. By the time we leave dinner, the roads tell us that the French, sans-tourist side of Nice is winning the fight with its English-translated foreign counterpart: doors shutter, lights flicker, stone streets empty. But not completely.
Dear reader, this is the time in our story where protagonists Owen, Laura, Ariana, and Alexa drank wine and listened to Chappell Roan and proceeded to offer our best contributions to the Nice nightlife, which involved much dancing to American music, sitting mysteriously on the porch, ordering drinks from the super-graphic-ultra-modern bartender in botched French, reacting in a completely reasonable manner when the only drink still available at 1am was a vodka Red Bull, taking power naps on a metal table only to be told that is strictly forbidden, and perpetually eyeing the splashing Mediterranean out the terrace window. Around 1am we jail-broke the bar and ran out to the sea, our jealous lover, where Owen skipped stones all the way to Algeria. We were danced out of our bones.
At night, the sea and sky collude, so close they almost seal themselves together into a single unending blue veil wrapped around the world. By that time, Nice is anchored in reality only by the distant string of dotted city lights which wrap around the coast. Bar sounds—faraway dancing, muffled vocals, the low hum of light pollution—interrupt the illusion as well, but I wonder about someone standing on the same shore hundreds of years ago, no lights behind or beside them, and how the whole world would be swallowed up in starry, cavernous blue. We talk about fluttering things, like how at the end of it all, life is meant to be about the person you think of when you look out at the ocean.
But we were hungry! And like I said, really all we did was eat. So we collected a bucket of fried chicken from the only restaurant still open, whose employees immediately spoke to us in English. This chicken was devastating for our vegetarian comrade Alexa, and delicious for the rest of us, and we broke it into greasy pieces over a plate of horrifically-named sauces, tastes like home, talking in the dark, feels like love.
Around 4am we fall asleep. As we have several times today, I think we have encountered the flatness of Nice again, just before sleep—the entire picture, all at once in frame. The picture is of the four of us, and every other local and tourist and stripes-dressed Frenchwoman and child balancing on a sandy ledge and sunbather withering in March and market vendor selling carved wooden animals and group of friends sitting knee-close around a cafe table over cappuccinos with hearts in their foam, practicing their French. It’s just a picture of people.
Is it romanticization? Of course it is.
Write us back with your stories. Tomorrow (today by the time you receive this) we depart for Italia, where we float in the language-less void and eat pasta. Stay tuned.
Much obliged,
Frog and Iggy (Laura and Owen)
March 24, 2024