What The River Brings
Winter faded fully into spring and I missed most of it. My mind was elsewhere. The days here are still filled with small things. The half baguette bought for sixty centimes and eaten with butter and apricot jam and a large mug of light sweet tea. The way the daylight slides in under the window shades every morning and then disappears again over the blue rooftops after dinner. The chiming of the church bells that begin at seven and continue every half hour for thirteen hours until the last bells ring at eight. All of the evenings are cut short because of the curfew. There are no nighttime walks under the street lamps with the lights of the city shattered across the black surface of the Seine. Every day there is only the lukewarm daylight, and the work, and the dishes. Every day there is only what the river brings.
This year I saw the cherry blossoms coming into flower in the cemetery, which was also where I saw the tulips and the daffodils and the tender violets coming up. Then for weeks afterwards I was driven indoors by the assault of the copulating trees, which rained an ungodly amount of pollen down, battering the streets and the sidewalks and the parks, a veritable orgy of pollen, in a city of arboreal Casanovas, coming in through the windows, collecting in our hair and on our clothes, first the golden pollen of the lindens and the chestnuts, and then the acid green rain of the honey locusts, followed by the maniacal fluff of the poplars that caught like wool between the cobblestones and gathered into white cotton drifts along the quays, quivering in the crisp spring breeze.
I’ve started taking long walks along the river every day. At first I thought I would walk all the way to the Eiffel Tower, but most days I don’t. Most days I cut the journey short by a handful of bridges. I try to make it at least as far as the Pont Alexandre III, near the Grand Palais, with its sculpted designs of cattails and cavorting water nymphs and gilded salamanders. I have come to occupy myself with the goings-on of the river. I slip into the stream of lovers, and joggers, and urban fishermen, and skateboarders practicing their tricks. There is almost no boat traffic these days. You can walk for hours without one passing, and the water grows so still that you can see down to the waving river grasses and the sunken shopping carts and metal crowd control barriers that have turned into algae gardens, with small fishes flitting about down there amidst the green. Last spring, during the first lockdown, there were also mud-caked bicycles and drowned rental scooters, though most have been pulled out now by the city.
I’ve started to watch for river trash and flotsam the way that other people might watch for birds. Last week I saw a Tarot card floating by face up, the Marseille deck’s Ten of Wands, which heralds the completion of an arduous project, or a couple that survives a difficult time and comes out the other side. Another day I saw a South Korean flag, gliding as serenely by as a manta ray just below the surface. Another day there was a spray of real orange roses, with another rose trailing a hundred yards or so behind, a white paper note stapled to its stem, too far away to read. Another day there was a three-foot white catfish, very dead and floating belly up, that was caught in a gyre near the houseboats. Another day there was a gold-colored beer can speeding down the center of the water that glinted in the light in such a way that it gave the impression of a diving bird.
I’ve grown familiar with the social constellations of ducks. The one female and four males that hang out near the Pont des Arts, which I imagine as a mated pair and their three grown sons, or the two females that can be found together near the Pont du Carrousel. There is a swan too, who is always alone, also near the Pont des Arts, or the Pont Neuf. I thought I saw his mate once recently, the only other swan on the river, a ways off on the water, but I haven’t seen them together since the previous spring. Are they the same swans from last year? Are they a pair? Are they fighting? Do swans break up? There are gulls and terns and moorhens too, and pigeons fighting like idiot ruffians over abandoned crusts of bread. Green parrots take off from the Tuileries and sail across the waters to the Left Bank. But it’s the ducks and the swan that seem tied to particular places. There are other duck couples too, near the port de Solférino, for example, and a single mother duck and her three ducklings that live in a wooden duck house tied to a houseboat near the Place de la Concorde, whom I have become perilously invested in.
It is dangerous, feeling anything like love for such small, wild things.