The plan was to drive from Barcelona to Biarritz. In Biarritz, a friend of a friend would let me use his apartment. It wasn’t going to be cheap though. Originally, my friend in Miami, Jorge, was supposed to share the apartment with me, but his plans got changed. For me, I didn’t want to deviate from the plan. I had to go to France, and I had to spend a month there studying French. That was just how it was, and I intended to keep to it, no matter the price.
In Miami, Jorge had told me that the price of the apartment was 12,000 francs, which converted to about $750. I thought for a month for $750 in a nice resort city was nice, so I said, “OK!” However, as I was on line preparing the rest of my trip, including a night in Paris, the figures didn’t add up. Therefore, I looked at a web site that did automatic conversations, and found that 12,000 francs wasn’t $750 but $1750. I whistled in agony because I didn’t know if I’d be able to afford such an amount. I called Jorge’s friend Thierry in Biarritz, and he told me he could only rent the apartment for three weeks, and the price would be 10,000 francs. Well, I was down to $1300, and I felt I needed to go, and I really wanted to go, so I agreed.
When I arrived in Barcelona, I was to call Thierry to make arrangements for the time I was to arrive. I had decided to rent a car and drive, so I had an estimated arrival time of about 8:00 in the evening. When I phoned Thierry, I discovered I had called his mobile telephone and that he was already in Paris, so he himself would not be meeting me. Instead, I needed to call his friend Giuseppe upon arrival in Biarritz.
As it turned out, I was a couple of hours late arriving in Biarritz because I got caught in traffic crossing from Andorra to France. There was also a huge fog storm, and the French police pulled me over to see if I had bought any Andorran cigarettes without paying the appropriate taxes. I called Giuseppe to alert him of my delay, and he was happy to meet me at 10:00. When we met, he took me to a long narrow alley and then motioned me to turn left through a small rust-colored gate. Behind the gate was a pepple pathway that led to the front door. Giuseppe used his lighter to find the keyhole, and unlatched the door. We walked in the dark up a flight of stairs where he used his lighter again to open the upstairs apartment where I would spending the following three weeks. I thought, “My God! I’m going to have learn to smoke just so I can get into my apartment.” I thanked Giuseppe for helping me, smiled as I looked at the bed awaiting me, and made an appointment to talk to him around 2:00 the next afternoon. I would have to go to the bank the next day to cash the travelers cheques so I could pay him the rent to be passed onto Thierry.
I woke up and decided to have my first official day studying in France. My plan was to spend the subsequent three weeks, studying and updating my French. To do this, I would go to coffee shops each morning to read a book or the newspaper and have petit-dejeuner, and then go to the apartment to write academic articles for my job. To do so was always my dream. I had always wanted to find a hideaway to go to in the summer, a place where I could get away from the rigamarole of daily university life and do the writing I was expected to do, as well as the writing I wanted to do. Since I had a large number of Haitian students to work with, I thought it might be a good idea to update my French and gain some confidence so that I could give them appropriate attention in an atmosphere otherwise dominated by Cuban and Latin American Spanish. So, I chose Biarritz as my hideaway, and I was there. It was time to get rolling, so I took a shower and walked to the center-ville to find my first newspaper, my first book, and my first coffee shop. I found a bookstore ironically called Bookstore where I found the book I was to read for the next three weeks as my principal French text. I knew that I should probably read something that more reflected my culture than the French one so that it would be easier to read. Since I hadn’t read Harry Potter yet, I chose the first in that series and bought it. I then needed to take Harry Potter to my first coffee shop and get started. I found a place where a woman with a sunburned face and a pink dress to match it fed me two Viennese pasteries, strawberry jam, and café au lait. It was my first attempt at ordering in French, and it went pretty well. I then dove into Harry Potter, and checked only a handful of words in my dictionary. It went very well, I thought. I may actually get to liking this routine.
At noon, I remembered that I needed to make the appointment with Giuseppe, so I went back to the apartment. I had on a pair of shorts, but I had been wearing those shorts for several days in a roll, so I decided they needed to be cleaned. I was doing laundry in Thierry’s machine, so I threw the shorts in with it, turned the nob to marking number 6, put in some detergent and went to turn on the television while I organized my things for the bank. I figured by the time I returned from the bank, my laundry would be done and I could go meet Giuseppe some time that afternoon.
In the main living on a medium-sized wooden table against a white wall, I had started to keep a stack of official things that guided my life. I was perplexed because I didn’t see the passport or the travelers cheques to be used for the rent on the table. I had placed them together to take to the bank, so I thought it odd that they weren’t where I had them. I went into the bathroom, into the bedroom, and back into the living room. All of the sudden, I said, “No! I didn’t!” I ran to the kitchen and looked at the washing machine. I didn’t see anything, but I tried to stop the machine. I didn’t know how to, and I saw water fill the machine and watched the clothes tumble, getting ever so much wetter and wetter. I turned the dial to the point where the machine would stop churning clothes, and I tried to open the circular windowed door. However, the machine, in its intelligence to not have water pouring out onto the kitchen floor, had locked the door, and I couldn’t get it open. Then the timer on the machine would advance the setting to the next section, and the clothes would start churning and the water would start filling the machine again. I screamed. I had to find out if the passport and money was even in there. All of the sudden, my passport bounced from the ceiling of the machine and onto my shorts, folded in half and dripping. I saw a strand of string that was the outline of the passport starting to unwind the outside of it. I panicked. I yelled. I turned the dial to a setting where the machine stopped and tried to open the door again. I couldn’t get the door open. And the longer I waited to open the door, the more the timer setting advanced to a new setting, thereby setting the machine into a spin again. I slapped the floor with my hand and yelped. Again, I saw my passport fold over and hit the sides of the machine, getting progressively wetter—my brand new passport—the passport that I just gotten as a replacement before my trip to Russia. And here, I thought, it might be disintegrating in front of my eyes. Here I was in front of the machine that had my passport. I could see my passport. My passport was shrinking before me, and there was nothing I could do, no matter how hard I tried. But where were the travelers cheques? I could have sworn I had the passport and the travelers cheques together. I tried to open the door again, and again, it was locked. I switched the setting, and again it moved into motion, adding more water and churning the clothes. Suddenly, instead of a passport, I saw a silver string come off the ceiling and on top of the clothes. Then with one more roll of the machine, a ball of wet paper, colored lavenderish blue fell on top of my shorts. I turned the dial so the machine would stop and stared at the ball of wet paper. I could just make out the AMER of American Express. There were my travelers cheques, all $1500 of them, either disintegrating or turning into a lint ball. I felt like giving up. I felt like escaping back to Barcelona and not paying Giuseppe or Thierry. I felt like jumping out the window. How could I do something so stupid, especially after the debacle with my passport before the Russian trip? And even here, it seemed like there should have been some way to stop that machine, but I just didn’t have the experience to know how to do it. I went into the other room to look for the original sheets of paper with the numbers and the phone numbers on it, but I realized that I had conveniently put them together with the passport for the first time in weeks, just so I could mark where I was spending them when I cashed them at the bank. They were rolling around in the washing machine, too!
I had to think back. What did I do in Miami when I got my travelers’ cheques? I had to remember. The day before I was to leave for Moscow, I went to the credit union at my university and bought $1500 worth of traveler’s cheques. I wrote the number in my Russian grammar book and sent myself the numbers again in an email message. I then downloaded the numbers onto the laptop computer I was going to take. I also placed the tickets registering the travelers cheques into a different bag than where I was carrying the travelers cheques themselves, and I told Angelo, who was taking care of my apartment, that I had written the number for the travelers cheques in my Yellow Pages front cover, in case there was any trouble. Just in case, you see!
I then pulled out my laptop and looked at the email message I had sent myself. That was there, so I took the numbers, wrote them in my diary, and put the diary in my backpack.
When I went back to the kitchen, the machine had stopped, and I wondered if on God’s green Earth if that door was going to let me open it—for whatever reason. And it did. And I pulled out a pair of green silk pants, a black tanktop, some underwear, and my shorts, all covered in American Express lint. They looked like they had just endured that greatest cotton storm in history. They were covered in itsy bitsy clumps of paper. My clothes were worth $1500, I thought. (The cheque lint would be hard to get off. I didn’t have a tumble drier, so I washed them two times more before wearing them. I thought they looked OK, but when I went to a discotheque and saw them under a black light, there were little dots of American Express covering my pants from top to bottom. I had never longed so much for a tumble dryer with a lint collector in my life.) At the bottom of my heap, however, was my passport. It was OK. Soaked, but OK! I opened the page to my picture and rubbed water off the page. All the other pages were stuck together, so I opened them slowly and carefully, successfully not ripping or tearing any of them. I took the passport outside to the balcony and hung it dry on the clotheline.
It was 2:00, and I knew Giuseppe would be waiting for me. I went to a pay phone to call him, and his answering service came on. I couldn’t even say a word, so I just hung up, spending 4 francs on nothing. I returned to the apartment, and placed my still-wet passport and the two lavender American express wet lint balls in my backpack. I then walked downtown, thinking, “Gosh, this is the time I should be writing, and now I’ve got to deal with this.” I found a tourist office and asked if they knew how to get an American Express refund. They motioned me to Barclay’s Bank, but it was closed. I then went into the Banque Nationale de Paris and asked. I said, “J’ai un probleme. Je doit changer mes cheques, mais je viens de les laver.” I have a problem. I have to change my cheques, but I just washed them. I then took out my two wet lavender lint balls and splatted them onto the front desk. A little bit of water even shot across the counter. One of the women behind the counter burst out laughing and the man I was talking to stood in front of me flustered with his mouth wide open. “Un moment, s’il vous plait,” and he picked up the phone. He said, “Je suis desole, mais je ne peux faire rien, mais vous pouvez allez a Change Plus, un bureau dans un edifice blanc dans cette rue a gauche.” I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything, but you can go to Change Plus, an office in a white building in this street to the left. I walked to Change Plus and explained my predicament again. He asked me if I had any cheques that could be usable, and again I placed the balls of goo on his desk in front of him. He said they would be rather difficult to sign, and I had to agree. He then noticed that the balls were a bit on the small side and asked me how those two little balls could possibly make up $1500. I said, “The rest of the cheques are floating in the washing machine and are caking my clothes.” He nodded that he understood. He then made a phone call and told me he could help me in one hour. I went and had an ice cream cone and then returned. As I returned, I puffed his mouth and said, “Avez-vous les cartes originales?” I said that I had washed them as well. He shrugged and said he couldn’t do anything unless he had those original numbers, but he had a phone number where I could turn to next. The person at the American Express office in Paris told me I could make a claim the next morning at the office of Credit Lyonnais. They would be waiting for me, and I could get a refund. I called and left a message on Giuseppe’s voice mail.
The next morning, I went to Credit Lyonnais, and I was indeed able to get a full refund. I showed the bank tellers there my two clumps of washed cheques, and they suggested that I make a necklace out of them. I called Giuseppe and made an appointment to pay him that evening. I then went back to my apartment and ironed my passport.
Insert “Song for Roberto y Amaya”