plate was rich and sharp in my mouth; it piqued my tongue and made me feel reckless—so I drank deeply and subdued my palette with smoky brie.
I was sitting across from a man who could fly, who had experienced war, whose writing prompted accolades in every country in which it was read, who had lived in barracks and deserts and grand estates. I had spent my entire life on a single path in a single city. My travels had never taken me to another time zone, never mind another continent. And I was supposed to teach him?
The things he could tell me. What was it like to detach oneself from the earth, to know the sky, to approach the sun? My face felt as ruddy as Antoine’s looked—but his had been engraved by the life he led. Scars arced through an eyebrow and near one side of his mouth. The skin of his forehead bore lines drawn through worry and weariness. At the corners of his eyes, pale rays were remnants of laughter and days spent squinting into the sun.
Now he squinted at the inquisitiveness of my expression. “What is it you want to know?”
I had stayed up half the night finishing
Courrier sud
, his story of a mail pilot flying from France to North Africa, the very route my uncle told me Antoine had established and maintained. The pilot had flown through the unforgiving night and through the pain of a broken heart. Had Antoine, too, been suffering the pangs of unreturned love? Why else would he have taken a lonely posting in Morocco, where he had written the book?
Reading, I had thought it impossible that the man of the newspaper clipping, in his elegant silk tie and his expensive suit, his hair combed back, his demeanor so at home in this restless city, had lived as simply as a nomad in the desert. But now I pictured him waking in the morning to feel heat rise through the soles of his feet, opening his eyes to a painful brilliance, opening his door to parched winds that stole the moisture from his mouth. I licked my lips. They tasted of salty heat. What had it been like to pass every day in unrelenting silence and sultriness, encircled by shimmering horizons, directionless without buildings or streets? What a torpor, heavy and sensual, would invade the spirit and weaken the principles. Where could one go for relief?
How could I pose a question, any question, without telling him that I felt his heat?
“Is it hot or cold in the sky over the Sahara?”
That first lesson, if it could be called a lesson, had stretched well into the night.
The kitchen had eventually closed, though drinks were still being served at the bar. The waitress had gone home, first bringing to the table, unbidden, another bottle of wine and two plates heaping with fried seafood and potato crisps. English was forgotten. At the center of a sea of empty tables, we ate with our fingers as Antoine told me story after story. He spoke of wartime marvels and misadventures—of falling planes unfurling smoke like the most exuberant of bridal trains; of darting likea fish between streams of fire; of the time he had played a joke on his navigator, lighting a flare port-side to convince the man that the plane was in flames and they had best jump. He spoke of the unwarranted fear of ascending to barely known heights; of failing to connect his oxygen and heat lines at 35,000 feet and minus 51 degrees. He described fingers so chilled they took twenty minutes to close the buckle on a strap, and clocks ticking away hours until it became clear that a pilot would not be coming back. He spoke of descending to a barely lit runway in the night when an obstacle appeared in his path: he pushed the nose down to ram his wheels hard into the ground, bounced over the truck and its terrified driver, and revved his engine to gain the altitude he needed in order to land.
He told me of his experiences in the North Sahara, opening the virgin territory to air postal service for the first time, of his education at the hands of his mentor Guillaumet in the tin barracks that had
I was sitting across from a man who could fly, who had experienced war, whose writing prompted accolades in every country in which it was read, who had lived in barracks and deserts and grand estates. I had spent my entire life on a single path in a single city. My travels had never taken me to another time zone, never mind another continent. And I was supposed to teach him?
The things he could tell me. What was it like to detach oneself from the earth, to know the sky, to approach the sun? My face felt as ruddy as Antoine’s looked—but his had been engraved by the life he led. Scars arced through an eyebrow and near one side of his mouth. The skin of his forehead bore lines drawn through worry and weariness. At the corners of his eyes, pale rays were remnants of laughter and days spent squinting into the sun.
Now he squinted at the inquisitiveness of my expression. “What is it you want to know?”
I had stayed up half the night finishing
Courrier sud
, his story of a mail pilot flying from France to North Africa, the very route my uncle told me Antoine had established and maintained. The pilot had flown through the unforgiving night and through the pain of a broken heart. Had Antoine, too, been suffering the pangs of unreturned love? Why else would he have taken a lonely posting in Morocco, where he had written the book?
Reading, I had thought it impossible that the man of the newspaper clipping, in his elegant silk tie and his expensive suit, his hair combed back, his demeanor so at home in this restless city, had lived as simply as a nomad in the desert. But now I pictured him waking in the morning to feel heat rise through the soles of his feet, opening his eyes to a painful brilliance, opening his door to parched winds that stole the moisture from his mouth. I licked my lips. They tasted of salty heat. What had it been like to pass every day in unrelenting silence and sultriness, encircled by shimmering horizons, directionless without buildings or streets? What a torpor, heavy and sensual, would invade the spirit and weaken the principles. Where could one go for relief?
How could I pose a question, any question, without telling him that I felt his heat?
“Is it hot or cold in the sky over the Sahara?”
That first lesson, if it could be called a lesson, had stretched well into the night.
The kitchen had eventually closed, though drinks were still being served at the bar. The waitress had gone home, first bringing to the table, unbidden, another bottle of wine and two plates heaping with fried seafood and potato crisps. English was forgotten. At the center of a sea of empty tables, we ate with our fingers as Antoine told me story after story. He spoke of wartime marvels and misadventures—of falling planes unfurling smoke like the most exuberant of bridal trains; of darting likea fish between streams of fire; of the time he had played a joke on his navigator, lighting a flare port-side to convince the man that the plane was in flames and they had best jump. He spoke of the unwarranted fear of ascending to barely known heights; of failing to connect his oxygen and heat lines at 35,000 feet and minus 51 degrees. He described fingers so chilled they took twenty minutes to close the buckle on a strap, and clocks ticking away hours until it became clear that a pilot would not be coming back. He spoke of descending to a barely lit runway in the night when an obstacle appeared in his path: he pushed the nose down to ram his wheels hard into the ground, bounced over the truck and its terrified driver, and revved his engine to gain the altitude he needed in order to land.
He told me of his experiences in the North Sahara, opening the virgin territory to air postal service for the first time, of his education at the hands of his mentor Guillaumet in the tin barracks that had
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