The year before I went to France, I went to an artist’s colony in rural Michigan. It was a place for artists to work, without the worries of non-artists, cars, Chicago, police sirens and cooking. Nonetheless, I was worried constantly about things, things like carrots. When I ate them they were orange-and that’s fine, but on leaving my body (I’m trying to be delicate here) they appeared unchanged. When I ate eggs and soy, my heart fibrillated faster than it ever had from jumping trampolines. I was already allergic to all milk products such as cheese (for ten years), but now I was gradually having problems with everything. Every kind of food.
The colony’s kitchen staff received new lists of forbidden ingredients from me each week. I wrote these up after my post-dinner naps, where covered in fresh hives I would reflect on my previous plate and blame the corn. I was furious with plants. At first I was able to explore the fury by mashing clay and sculpting heads in my studio. But by the end the summer I spent most of my time in my room resting down some new allergic reaction and thinking it was the early stages of a fatal illness that would kill me before I turned twenty-five.
Luckily I found a decent doctor and she called me a celiac. That’s someone who can’t eat even the tiniest accidental fleck of gluten, a protein in wheat, barley, oats and rye, sausages, crackers, bread, adhesives on envelopes, lipstick, sausages, the papier-mâché stuck to my hands that I made my puppets out of, malt, sausages, some spices, soy sauce, lotion enhanced tissues and sadly, sausages. She told me all the problems I ever had with allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, eczema, bruising, fatigue, my skinny chicken-arms, hammertoes, potbelly, grey hairs, flatulence, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, slow learning, brain fog, nail spots, irregularity, bad mood, bushy tail, and general inability to thrive were all symptoms of a celiac who eats these foods.
So I stopped eating gluten, and things got better for me (I took two naps a day instead of four), but not much. Still, the only foods that didn’t cause nasty physiological responses that required several rolls of toilet paper were versatile avocados and zucchini. I thought about leaving college so I could I spend more time confusedly grocery shopping, but I didn’t. Double majoring in printmaking and creative writing, already required me to be in school longer than most needed to be. In the midst of my suffering I signed up to go on a month-long trip to Paris.
I thought it was a dangerous idea for me since France from what I heard is a banquet of baked goods and cheese. Dangerous, but I had a secret advantage. After eleven years of immersion education (where they deliver monologues to you in a language you don’t know), I can speak French like a mentally challenged three-year-old. Going with me were seventeen other students, and none any prior exposure to the language. So while they ate their delicious chocolate-mousse-cake-croissant-cheese-tuna-and-tomato-sandwiches with the gold leaf flecks in forced silence, I would engage in conversations concerning the color of grapefruits with the locals.
Traveling in a bunch of art students to France is a pilgrimage, after hours of walking we’d arrive at Our Lady Louvre or the Sacred D’Orsay. On our knees we’d spray each other with holy water in front of Botticelli’s frescoes, and emit ecstatic shrieks for Van Gogh’s miracles in canvas form, his color, what color! We visited the official religious sites too like Notre Dame, St. Denis and St. Sulpice. When we went to Sacre Coeur, four of us roamed around in the basement and discovered whole femur bones on lace lain inside some glass, relics. Since I was the one who could always explain what the French people were saying, because I always had an explanation, but partly because I am an insufferable know-it-all, and also partly because I always seem to know where we arrived from and the correct metro to take, but in this particular situation mostly because I was raised Catholic, they asked me what the heck was going on.
Relics are things left behind by saints and holy folks Catholics wrap up since they’re auspicious to have around. There are three different degrees of relics; third-degree relics consist of things the saint touched, like a doorbell. Second-degree relics are things worn by the saint like their old ray-bans or a pair of pantyhose. First-degree relics such as the femurs mentioned are pieces of the saints themselves, and are the premium grade. Once saved, relics can be prayed to, to get the attention of the saint it derives from. Usually God has a lot to do, so when you have a broken oven, consider praying to a piece of a saint who specializes in concerns of the kitchen, such as San Lorenzo who watches over boiled food (he was boiled to death).
I went to the Versailles palace without eating breakfast. Four hours of pushing against other tourists led me to the café where the only safe (maybe) thing for me to eat there was this seven-euro espresso cup filled with stale peanuts. After lunch and still starving, I entered the manicured grounds to see if anything could please me there. I was lost in the middle of a Cleveland-sized garden when my bladder felt ripe. With multiple bodily functions repressed a person loses interest in factual information. It didn’t matter that the sheep nearby were descendants of Marie-Antoinette’s own flock, until I touched them. In this spirit I ate some rose petals off of a bush. I wanted rose-breath, the real essence of Versailles more corporeal than a photograph.
The many dogs of France are carried in soft purses and baskets and are probably fed flowers tastier than roses as they never seem to bark. What you might not know is that France is also full of dragons that look like dogs, but they are exterminated with swords and spears. In Normandy you can visit Mont St. Michel, the actual mountain where Saint Michael (whose status in the Christian world is great, probably equivalent to David Bowie in the world of popular music.) beat up Lucifer, the naughty one of the angels and sent him down to hell where he became the devil. On this historic mountain are probably forty-six different gift shops, and each one sells key chains commemorating the event. Though they were both angels, St. Michael in the key chain’s picture is described to be a muscular sort of angel dressed like an ancient Roman soldier, and Lucifer looks like a dog with an extra long torso made especially for stabbing.
Several other churches are like the church at the Mont and feature a golden figurine of St. Michael slaying Lucifer on the tip-top spire. Climb up a tower at Sacre Coeur and you can get a view of such a statue from the unusual perspective of above. This genre of icon is in several museums like the Museé de la Moyan Âge (middle ages). There I saw a painting with a feminine version of the myth, “Saint Marguerite Stands-on-to-death A Helpless Yelping Dragon."
Observing yet another dragon’s shriveled demise I caught a brain zing. My class’s devil-tour was disguised as a voyage to France.
This was exciting to discover, as I love demons, or rather drawing them. For my first nineteen years of life I drew piles and piles of heart-patterned gauze that enveloped longhaired ladies and their buttoned riding boots. But once I turned twenty I wasn’t interested in that anymore. One week I drew well-dressed demons, but then I dropped the clothes to include more horns, spit, teeth and scales. Drawing bad creatures I hoped would protect me from further bad things, like excessive bruising. The gargoyles on top of Notre Dame have been security gaurds for hundreds of years. I met them in a storm. They were glaring, collecting all the harmful wet rain and spouting it down where it wouldn’t weigh down prayers being sent up from inside.
In all I saw about seven different crypts and cemeteries. If you’re visiting dead people be prepared, sometimes they’ll notify more receptive or flaky people with a message. Before seeing Pere Lachaise cemetery for the rich and famous I had a march stuck in my head from Bizet’s opera Carmen. It’s an old favorite with from the jukebox in my head, growing up my parents as well my French teacher played the opera a lot, but this was on a consistent loop (even while sleeping) for a week. Entering, I got a cemetery brochure listing everyone important buried there, including George Bizet. I wanted to see his grave but Pere Lachase is a confusing place, we had a pre-navigated tour of visual artists and in my adrenal fatigued state I didn’t feel like finding it myself.
Just after seeing the spot where Gericault was placed, and right before meeting up with Delacroix we walked down another skinny path lined with houses of dead that were the same size but much more ornate than parking ticket attendant houses. My class was talking about something mundane, beer or cake when I jerked my head to the left. I did this for no reason, no one was over there and no one had sneezed. But right there was George Bizet’s tombstone. I felt his appreciation, and I took it as hope. In the mean time I will continue to shock the bread-centric French people as they pass on the story of the woman they saw in the park eating out of a tin of sardines at 8:30 in the morning. She spilled out extra oil out for the pigeons, but not even the pigeons are interested in anything beyond croissants at that hour.
