Strangers on a train find France too French

Not being allowed to drink in the Louvre and a native's failure to speak English prove too much for one visitor.

THERE WAS a woman on the train to Dublin last week, giving off about a trip she took to Europe.

“Oh,” she said to her companion, “we had a very bad experience in France last year. We were at some railway station and I could see a sign saying Sortie. Well we weren’t supposed to get off at Sortie, so I got into a fluster and I turned to a man on the platform and asked him was this where we were supposed to be, or was it some place else?

“Well he just looked at me with his jaw hanging down, so I said, slowly, ‘I thought I was in Paris but a sign on the wall says Sortie. So can you please tell me where I am.’

He just said, ‘I don’t speak English’.

“Can you believe it? ‘I don’t speak English.’ I mean he didn’t make the slightest effort. Here we are trying to go to France and be all friendly with the Europeans, and he just turns on his heel as rude as can be!”

“Dear, oh dear,” her companion said, throwing her eyes up to the ceiling and looking like a painting of a female Christian saint on the rack, to borrow a phrase from Tennessee Williams.

I should have known that something was wrong. The lady opposite me continued. “The bottled water was another issue,” she said.

“What was the bottled water about?” her companion wondered, and though the lady so aggrieved by the French was a robust person who would not have been out of place in a wrestling ring, her companion was, to borrow another phrase from Tennessee Williams, a dainty little teapot that one could never imagine boiling.

I'm the kind of person who reads books on trains and I happened to be reading The Night of the Iguanaby that great American writer, but the point is that whenever I find phrases from a book in my hand manifesting in real life, it's invariably an indication that I am ill.

“The bottled water was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the wrestler said. “We were in the souvenir shop in the Louvre and we bought two of them. And I just happened to open one and was sucking at it when the lady behind the counter said, ‘You can’t drink in here’. The cheek of her! Sure I was buying it, for God’s sake! And even in the art gallery, the security man followed us around from room to room. I mean did he think we were going to rob a painting?”

The dainty teapot said, “I love Picasso.”

The wrestler wasn’t convinced. “Don’t talk to me about Picasso,” she said, “there was one picture of a woman, sideways, and I declare to God if you had an eye like she had you’d have to go to the clinic with it. But there was no need to follow us around. Imagine! That spoiled the whole thing on me. I can tell you I was glad to be back in Ireland.” They both looked out the window. The sun was shining on Croke Park, making the stands smooth and bright, but nothing more was said.

In Dublin I had a meeting at the Irish Theatre Institute, and a bowl of green soup with an actor, and either the actor or the soup reminded me of a poem in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.

“The time has come the Walrus said / To talk of many things / Of shoes and ships and sealing wax / Of cabbages and kings / And why the sea is boiling hot / And whether pigs have wings.”

I didn’t say this to the actor. He might have thought I was losing my mind. Instead, I just said, “I don’t think I’m well today,” and I got an early train home where, after a grotesque attempt at eating a quiche, someone took me to accident and emergency where I lay on a trolley for the night, amid the usual bedlam of groaning humanity, blood in the toilets and heroic nurses. They gave me painkillers, and tied me to a drip, and in a short while I floated through the looking glass again.

Around my trolley I saw manys a Christian saint in pain and agony, and a battalion of dainty teapots endlessly moving up and down the corridor. “How’s them guts?” a doctor in a blue hat asked me the following day.

“Oh Doctor,” I declared, without shame, “it’s coming out of me like crude oil.”