A Diplomat and a Clandestin

They were in the water, there in the warm seawater, blind and spineless, mindlessly bobbing with the rest of us, glass noodle tentacles petting shoulders and ears, raising little rashes like those of stinging nettles. It was the jellies that played social catalyst this day in this cove, where tourists squinted, obscuring the sight of the swimsuit confettied beach so to create a sense of solitude. Nothing pushes people apart like having to share something. Nothing brings people together like a mutual enemy.

The sun was on the water, blessing every wave that bulged, lifting and lowering the bodies and then spreading uncurled upon the little beach cove.

The diplomat, chin low above the water, stroked over and declared she too was stung by jellies, and it was great to hear someone say Shit! again, and did I think it was the water temperature?

“Of course; apparently pissing only invites them nearer. Like bugs to a flame.”

“Is that so?”

I suppose she was embarrassed but I didn’t notice because I was leaning into my next phrase.

“That’s what an architect told me in Marseille. It makes sense.”

“And do architects have special knowledge about jellyfish?”

I said this one did, this one knew about all sorts of things, and I asked about her occupation. A diplomat. Here on holiday but working up in Paris on some big environmental pact. She said it with pride dressed in reticence:

“Oh. I’m a diplomat.”

I saw through, and she didn’t see me see through because she was too busy trying to cool her pride without dampening the effect of the word: diplomat. I’d been feeling desperate about my situation, I’d just reached a dead-end with the local consulate in Haute-Savoie, but I knew I’d have to convince her of my freedom before I pled for it.

“You know architects in Marseille know a shit-ton about jellyfish? Some of them also grow figs on their balconies. Great figs. Marseille figs.”

She was puzzled so she laughed.

“I smoked weed with the architect and his design friends in from Paris on his balcony after we got stung by jellies in Marseille. He grew that too. They’re very dynamic in my experience, architects in Marseille. Shame you can’t smoke weed, being a diplomat.”

She lifted an uncomfortable, cautious smile.

“Don’t you think it might help? Getting stoned with Flanby?”

Flanby (slang for crème caramel) is the French’s nickname for their unpopular president, François Hollande. The socialist who spends 11-grand monthly on haircuts but lacks the swagger of Sarkozy. Whose public cowardice and polite policies lack la ferveur of Le Pen.

She gave a look of recognition and said she didn’t want to talk about her work.

I asked had she ever worked in Africa?

“Yes.”

“Which countries? Côte d’Ivoire? Morocco? Algeria? I’d like to go to Algiers. I’ve been reading Camus.”

She repeated she didn’t want to talk about her work.

We were treading. I should have mentioned that. But the water was salty and treading was easy. She was still waiting for something and I wasn’t sure what. She could have been my mother. I’d been drinking Pastis. I guess you guessed as much.

“Comment t’appelles-tu?” She said.

“What’s my name or what do I call myself?”

“What do others call you?” She rolled her eyes, give me a break.

I told her what most people call me.

She smiled, “Enchanté,” then at ease, told me her name. It wasn’t a good one for a diplomat. Phonetically unfit for permanent ink.

“Enchanté,” I nodded.

“Look at that sloop,” she said, pointing at a cutter blurred and clipping above the bowed horizon. “I’ve always admired sailors.”

“That’s a cutter,” I said, “You know a boat like that can cross the Atlantic in a couple weeks?”

She mmm’d in reluctant acknowledgement.

“Anyway,” I said, letting water roll into my mouth and spitting it out coolly, “I wouldn’t piss in the water with all these motherfucking méduse about.”

That made her laugh. She treaded a little closer and said she was happy to hear a real American say motherfucking. That gave my heart a squeeze but I rebounded.

“Motherfucking cock-sucking ass-eater.”

She laughed again.

“Are you up to speed on the French curses?”

She shook her head.

“Je t’biffle! Suce ma bit! Fils de pute!”

She thanked me for the educational experience and asked what I was doing in France. I nodded up at Brigitte on the rocks. Brigitte had been closely watching but when I looked in her direction she swung her eyes out at the blurry horizon and squinted. She was in a high-cut red one-piece and her skin was dark tan.

“Your first international girlfriend?” There, she couldn’t hide her jealousy dressed in condescension.

“Intentional? It wasn’t intentional. It’s never intentional. The mustang doesn’t stalk the yoke. The yoke stalks the mustang.”

She giggled. “Int-ERNASH-ional!” Her mouth hung open, tongue resting on her lower teeth, her eyes coquettish and wide, hung on mine.

“Oh, intERNASHional. I’m no diplomat.” I grinned, ironically. I felt I had the high ground.

“And what are you?” She was loose with the anticipation of taking it back, “Other than a mustang?”

“Other than a mustang?” I put a dripping hand on my chin and looked up at the sun. “I’m a clandestin.”

I smiled. So did she. I waved at Brigitte; her little voice sang, “Hi Poulpe!”

——————

Later, on the rocks, Brigitte’s head in my lap and napping, a notebook in my hands and an open bottle of Ricard by my feet, the diplomat came climbing up towards us. I noticed she had a good body for her age, for a diplomat for that matter, and I was sure then she’d rested her head on powerful chests or played the part of the powerful chest for the resting heads of beautiful others.

“I thought I’d give you my card, in case you two are ever in Paris.”

Brigitte stirred and smiled up at her. It was easy to feel easy; Brigitte was especially posh that day, her wet hair pulled back and dark, tucked behind her ears. Her pearl studs popping like Roman marble against her olive skin.

“You would like to sit with us?” Brigitte offered sincerely. “You are the diplomat?”

Brigitte smiled. If it’d been before I made her quit she would’ve lit a cigarette then. Instead she started giving herself a double French braid.

“That’s my job.” The diplomat took a seat on the rock slab.

She was embarrassed. I tried reassuring her by offering a chunk of beaufort balanced on the blade of my extended Opinel. She refused.

“Not very French of you.”

She shrugged, immune. “I’m American.”

“And a patriot!” I clowned.

I didn’t bother offering the Ricard, I knew she’d reject it. I poured myself another strong one, measuring the water in so it changed from amber to that cloudy lime complexion. She tried not to watch me doing it. I guess she thought she was being polite.

For a while the diplomat talked about how she didn’t want to be a diplomat anymore and was thinking of going back to California to reinvent herself. No, she didn’t want to teach. She didn’t like young people. No, she didn’t mean that, we were different. Why? Oh because we’re not arrogant. At least not Brigitte. That made me laugh.

Brigitte listened carefully, her head working fast to translate every phrase. She was impressed, meeting a diplomat.

“Trump got you down? Is that why you’re hanging it up?” I pressed.

“It is a catalyst.” She used this word like a worn tool, always in her belt, always the solution. “That fact. That possibility, rather. Although, if I’m being honest, I’d really feel more useful. He’d really need me. People like me.”

She was embarrassed at the way that sounded, but she couldn’t save it.

“People with experience, you know?”

I nodded and leveraged the high ground to ask more about her experience.

She’d worked for Albright and Powell and Rice and Clinton and now Kerry. All neat answers. All rubbed smooth by repetition.

“I had the honor of serving under three administrations, but only the pleasure of serving two.”

“That’s a funny distinction,” I said. She didn’t appreciate that. “Do you think he’ll win?”

“Who, Trump? Oh no,” she laughed. “The American people are much too smart for that.”

I cocked my head, smirking. She added, “It’s a nice final shout for all those Bob Ewell’s, but they’ll fail. The future is here now.” Rubbed smooth.

I turned my eyes to the pillared ruins across the cove, nodding, telegraphing doubt. “People like their walls.”

There was a contemplative silence. Brigitte cut it, “Do you have children?”

“Oh no. Oh no. I’m the mother of treaties and summits and ceasefires.” She chuckled.

“More the midwife, no?” She didn’t like that.

“Maybe, okay.” Flustered. “So no. I’m not a mother. And you two? When will you make your first little dual citizen?”

A chest laugh came like a sudden bout of gas and passed out my open mouth. I didn’t mean it but there it was.

“Oh no,” said Brigitte. “I never want kids. No way. Not me. No way. Not in this world.”

The diplomat nodded in smug agreement and turned to me.

“Sure, I’ll be a dad sometime. But I agree, on a different planet. Not that this one’s in bad hands; I’m sure you do fine work, Emissary. Just an increasing dearth of elbow room is all.” I pumped my elbows like a chicken. The women laughed, they’d been wanting to laugh.

I turned the conversation to bullshit. Lakers or Clippers? You tore your Achilles like Kobe? No surgery? But I thought it snaps and coils like a rubber band? A mystery of medical science, I see, I doubt, but I see. Yes, Yosemite is breathtaking. Yes, funny, I too have found the French reticent about their English, which usually really isn’t that bad, they all take it in school after all, but isn’t it nice in the end, learning to speak their language? Challenging yourself in order to circumvent their reticence? Reticence only bars the cowardly, no?

“Or the polite,” she offered cautiously.

“That’s just what I said. The cowardly.”

I knew Brigitte was bored now, since my bullshit detour. She hated hearing foreigners talk about her country. And she hated more enduring my games. Further, I felt the diplomat needed some time to think. So I got up with my snorkel in hand and announced we’d be going out for an investigative look at the local marine life, and she was welcome to join if she wanted.

She politely declined. I pulled a gulp of Ricard right from the bottle.

“Not very French.”

I smiled. “I’m not French.”

She reached for the bottle and took her own pull. She’d earned it. Brigitte was already on her way to the water.

—————

It was strange, seeing the jellies, so menacing in our blindness and so innocent under illumination. There they floated and pumped in the warm seawater just like the rest of us. There for the warm seawater like the rest of us. Just as much a right to the cove as the rest of us. I watched them from behind my mask and Brigitte, absent of empathy for the simple invertebrates, went out to the cooler water where I guess she saw an octopus. She was proud of that. Octopi are exotic. I got stung a few more times, but again, it was no worse than nettles. And as a lover of raspberry foraging, I am callused to nettles.

—————

We’d just smoked a little joint and sat around the point now on a different slab of rock and watched the boats coming back to the port like so many dirty faced children to a mother’s call for dinner. The town was Cassis. It seemed trivial to mention that before, but as you claim this image for your own romantic memory, it would be wrong to deprive you of such a phonetically pleasing name with which to associate it: Cassis.

I was starting to feel anxious maybe the diplomat had left when she appeared around the corner, and seeing us, sat where she stood.

“Look, Poulpe. It’s the diplomat.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “There she is.”

The diplomat felt us watching so she came over.

“Funny seeing you guys again.”

“It’s destiny,” I said.

“Sit with us,” Brigitte said.

The diplomat sat down and immediately started digging through her bag, holding wide its mouth and searching into it.

“Would you guys like to paint with me? I have three canvasses and three brushes.”

“Did you hear what I said? Destiny.” Brigitte believed it.

“So?”

“Yes, we want to paint with you!” Brigitte was thrilled, meeting destiny, and by a beach cove in Cassis!

We all sat there painting. I suppose at the start I was very aware of my being high and keen to hide it. Then I came off the crest and felt easy again.

I painted the double level bluffs across the mouth of the port. The lower was knitted with green trees and the upper was sandstone of so many ochre hues. There were ruins up atop and I wondered, here in France, if they were of the Lugians, the Phocaeans, the Romans or some other group, uncredited. Surely, like the cliffs themselves, the foundations of the ruins were built upon those of their predecessors. I thought of sketching them as I imagined they once were, but chose to keep my cards close and stuck to the landscape.

We all shared a pallet and the diplomat kept stealing my colors. She was painting the bluffs too. Brigitte painted the lighthouse beside us. Her’s was the best.

“You know I used to issue visas in Brazil? I did the interviews.”

Brigitte and I touched eyes, tuned our focus.

“How was that?”

“Well, the fun part was the margin of error. My boss told me even if I did a perfect job I’d still have a 10% margin of error.”

“Well that’s fun.” I was sure Brigitte didn’t know this phrase, margin of error, but she joined in, agreeing That is fun, having a margin of error.

“It was fun. So I’d give the exceptionally beautiful men visas. I called it the genetic pool visa.” Rubbed smooth by repetition.

Brigitte laughed. “I would do the same thing! The genetic pool visa.” Turning to me, “Poulpe, you should get the genetic pool visa.”

“Didn’t you hear her? Exceptionally beautiful.” That embarrassed everyone but me. “But I’ll tell you what is exceptionally beautiful. The sky in your painting.”

The diplomat blushed. She’d already made clear how doubtful she was about her painting. That her recently deceased father mistook one of her landscapes for a hiker resting on his pack. I could’ve offered it was perhaps more indicative of her ailing father’s optical erosion than of her painting, but that much restraint I managed.

“Thank you. I put a special emphasis on the sky.”

“It’s paying off.”

“Thank you.”

“So, did you participate at all in the enhancement of the American genetic pool with one of your lucky ten percenters?”

She laughed.

“No, I’m not a mother, remember? I sent them to my sister. Besides, I had my own Brazilian.”

“Ahh, the life of a diplomat.”

“I wasn’t a diplomat then.”

“Ahh, the life of a diplomat.”

“Stop it, Poulpe!”

The women looked at each other and grinned.

“He’s horrible isn’t he?”

“He’s a kid, trust me, he’s really a kid.” Then turning to me, but speaking for the diplomat, “You’re really taxing.” She couldn’t stop using this word once she’d discovered it. For so long she’d sought out the right English word to describe my annoying behavior, and she finally felt she’d found it. Since then, she’d employed it like a shiny new tool on her belt.

“That’s the right word, I think,” agreed the diplomat. “He is taxing.”

I taxed them further, deflating their smug little mood by withdrawing the catalyst on which it depended.

“I’m going to go tax the spear fishermen.”

They both told me not to go, not to bother them and to work on my painting, that the light was going, and blah blah... I went down the rocks and talked to the spear fishermen. Neither ‘Bonsoir’ nor ‘Good evening’ struck but they were Spanish so I was fine. They weren’t in the mood. They were on a mission. Si, they had fished there before. No, nothing specific, just anything they found. Si, it’s a fairly good spot. Claro, buena suerte.

I went back and found intense concentration in place of the awkwardness with which I’d endowed the women. The diplomat’s water was now equaling the quality of the sky, but the bluff wedging itself between was nearly abandoned. Flat, yellow, ugly.

“Lovely work,” I told her. “I’m a big fan of surrealism. I wish I’d thought to replace the bluffs with a hunk of fromage between sky and sea. Is it a metaphor? Are the cheese cliffs— obviously representative of French culture—eroding into the sea which carries the ships of all those uninvited clandestins?”

She looked up at me with big irritated eyes for which Brigitte spoke: “TAXING.”

I retook my post and the painting continued.

“So are you really here illegally?”

“Yes!” Brigitte answered for me, “He is real clandestin.”

I nodded. The girls both chuckled and looking down from high ground the diplomat inquired, “So when will you return home to the States?”

It wasn’t her fault. I have green eyes and more than a drop of conquistador in my complexion. Besides, even if she’d known my origin she couldn’t assume my circumstance.

“Don’t you remember? I am a clandestin.” She still searched. “My full given name is Moctezuma, if that helps. No joke.”

Brigitte was always proud about my name. It’s exotic. I suppose she felt something of whatever the Victorian collectors felt. She perked up.

“My mother was a romantic and a loyalist to an empire she never knew. Of course I’m neither of those. I don’t conform to invisible lines.” I sighed. Brigitte didn’t stir. “So indeed, the Atlantic was not the first water I crossed.”

As the diplomat’s look changed from that of confident inquiry to confusion to recognition, the high ground sunk from below her until only her eyes rose low above the brim of the soil. I knew then that she wouldn’t help me and just knowing was a release. Answers have a way of bringing the ground to one’s feet. She swallowed.

“I understand.”

“God, I’d love to be a diplomat.”

“There’s nothing I could do. Honestly.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I have a couple people I could call, I can try, I can—but, listen have you tried—”

“Yes. That’s alright. Look at me. I’m painting sunset with a pair of beauties in Cassis. Besides, who says a man of my work needs solid ground to build? I’ll design house boats, or sky houses, the future is here now, no?”

She smiled at me, breathing out her nose, the wells of her eyes filling and I squinted back at her, breathing out my open mouth. I didn’t feel bad. I’d told her in the water at the start. She just hadn’t wanted to listen.

We all resigned to silence. All turned back to our little canvases and moved our brushes just to tread away from that moment before. I’d lost interest in the landscape. I put a wash of blue over everything and took a surrealist turn. When the canvas dried I painted a jellyfish, quiet and apart from all the bobbing bodies, sinking its tentacles like roots into the sandy bottom. A flowery mantle growing up out the bell and sheltering it like a luminescent rooftop.

I’d thought all day the diplomat might try inviting us back to her seaside hotel for a ménage à trois—lord knows I had the ammunition that day—but in the end she just apologetically thanked us for the company and parted with a pair of those bullshit French cheek kisses.

Brigitte was in her world.

“I feel like I’m in movie! A diplomat. A real diplomat!”

That night, rolling in the sheets, I sunk my sex into her like a spade in newfound and fertile soil, her twisting, her mouth agape in a silent shout, receiving all those seeds I suppose she felt through a filter of exotic wonderment—mon poulpe!—as ink.