Fly-Fishing the 41st (5 page)

“Well,” Pierre concluded, looking at his watch, “there's just too much to talk about all at once; let's return to my place for lunch and we can speak about the fly-fishing
salon.
”

Under a light drizzle I followed Pierre to his home, several doors down from his office, also on rue Dauphine.

“So what is the name of your fiancée?” Pierre asked me casually.

“Her name is Yannid.” I didn't find it worthwhile to tell him she was not my fiancée.

“She has a very nice voice,” he remarked, looking straight ahead through his clerical glasses, his wavy matted hair becoming wet under the drizzle. “I talked to her on the phone when I called you the other day. I assume you will return to France often to see her—of course—you have to paint all the beautiful French trouts.” He laughed. “In the east of France we have a very interesting trout we call
truite zébrée.
This is a very unique fish; it has dark vertical bands on it like a zebra. I will introduce you to Philippe Boisson; he knows the rivers there better than anyone; well, maybe I will go too. The
zébrée
is the trout that Gustave Courbet painted that hangs in the Orsay Museum down the street on quai Conti. You must go see it.”

 

“The house used to be a
bordel,
” Pierre told me as we entered a dark hall over a patterned tile floor and up a small stairs. “As you will see,
downstairs there is an exit onto rue Mazet where the men would leave so they would not be seen coming and going from the same door, or the same street.”

In a large sunlit room on the top floor of Pierre's apartment, I met Pierre's wife, Carole. She was preparing lunch for two of their three children, who were screaming as they chased each other around the room. Carole looked at Pierre with one hand on her hip and the other on her cigarette. She was tapping her foot, her apron besplattered with macaroni and cheese. Then she turned to the children. She spoke what seemed to be immaculate French, but with an American accent.

“Marlin! Venice!
Regarde-moi!
”

“
Qu'est-ce qu'elle fait?
” cried their father.

“She should be doing her homework, Pierre.”

“Do your homework, Venice.”

“Papa!”

I remembered when I saw the paintings on the walls that Nick had told me about Carole being a painter with an unusual subject. The one before me was an oil about a meter square depicting a close-up of an animal's genitalia, I know not what kind; tender pink flesh resolved to a wrinkled pile of purplish skin. As an organic abstraction it was beautiful, like an O'Keeffe painting, but not flowers.

Ignoring the chaos about the kitchen, Pierre took me down a narrow stair. Halfway down we encountered his third child, May Fario, a dark-haired girl in adolescent bloom who, like the youngest, Marlin, was named by Pierre for a type of fish (
fario
is the subspecies name of a brown trout native to western Europe).

There were two rooms mysteriously set on half floors off the stairs and then two more on the floor we descended to. The room, unlike the one we'd entered upstairs, was dimly lit. It was wide and fortresslike and the walls were uneven and richly colored, alternating yellow and red. There was only one window, tall and thin in the corner of the room, and a plain metal door that exited onto rue Mazet.

Ragged and cracking skin mounts of pike and trout, some in terrariums with sprigs of lake weed and logs, were hung about the room, musty and dusty like relics of an abandoned mansion. There were also plaster casts of large zander and carp that Pierre had caught in the Seine, and hanging by chains from the ceiling were giant metal sculptures of horrifying insects with chain-saw wings, enormous steel hooks, oil-can collars, antennas of knife blades, bodies of mammal vertebrae. “You will meet the artist who made these tomorrow night when we set up for the fly-fishing show. He's a true original. Would you believe he's a tax inspector and does all this art on the side? You will be astounded by his atelier; it's a wonder he can make any of this stuff there, it's hardly large enough to stand up in.”

I thought my eyes had feasted on every nook of the room until I looked at the ceiling, where Carole had painted a Sistinesque rendition of naked cherubim riding dolphins firing gilt arrows at salmon and tarpon with miniature bows. The faces on the cherubim were those of Pierre's fishing cronies, a cast of diverse characters that I would come to know over the next several months.

The more I looked around the room, the more it began to live and breathe. The long, slender, and thick-shafted pike gnashed their teeth from the wall, but with glazed and blind eyes. Two of the iron insects flew about, flapping their chain-saw wings, spreading their shadows on the blood-and-urine-colored walls. Pierre's wild children, seated at lunch upstairs before a painting of an animal's vulva, were a product of this place, this womb-room, this dangerous erotic playground, never certain whether to take the comfort of the couch or to flee the grotesque assemblage of anatomy and art.

When I thought we could go no deeper in the old brothel, Pierre took me down a small stair into what he called the
cave,
a small basement made warped and Gaudi-like by centuries. The cave was his fishing room, thick with feathers and flies, hand-forged fishing spears, and all manner of materials worthy of a creative inferno. Hundreds of fishing rods leaned up against the ancient mortar wall,
resembling in a row the baleen of a whale's maw. In this catacomb, a lifetime of angling detritus rested. “So,” said Pierre, turning off the light, “I think we should eat a little, and then I'll show you where we fish in the Seine.”

T
HE
I
LE DE LA
C
ITÉ AND
L
E
S
ALON
DE LA
P
ÊCHE À LA
M
OUCHE

P
apa, Papa!” cried little Marlin, looking up toward his father. “No, we cannot bring the fishing rods,” said Pierre. Pierre hoisted Marlin onto his shoulders and we walked in under the drizzle to Pont Neuf and down to the place du Vert Galant over wet cobbles to the tip of Ile de la Cité.

“There are two islands in the river here in Paris,” Pierre explained, “Ile Saint-Louis and here on Ile de la Cité. These are the two best places to fish. When the river is in flood the fish stack up in the eddy downstream of the island where the current is broken. There are probably five hundred bream here. They especially don't like current, and at times the big
silure
come to feed on them. You would not believe, but you will see! They open their giant mouths and eat a four-pound bream whole. While you were skiing, my friends Jean-Pierre and Guy hooked eight off Ile Saint-Louis. They landed one that was about thirty kilos and lost one they said would have been nearly fifty—that's a hundred and ten pounds!”

West of where we stood was the metal walking bridge, the Pont des Arts, and on the Left Bank, the Musée d'Orsay, on the right, the Louvre. Upstream were Ile Saint-Louis and Notre-Dame, whose bells indicated it was well into the afternoon.

“This is the most beautiful pool in the world,” Pierre proclaimed, passing Marlin to me as he climbed over a rail, “and the fishing gets better every year. The Seine was very much polluted in the sixties and the only fish that lived here, if any, were the carp and eel. Now there are thirty-eight species in downtown Paris. I only started catching
silure
two years ago, small ones. This is the first year we have caught such monsters.”

“And you eat them?” I asked Pierre.

Pierre looked at me through his glasses, raising his gnomish nose and scratching his wavy hair. “Oh, yes, we eat them.” He smiled as if to assure me that I would eat them too. “The Seine is clean; in a year or two my friend André insists he will swim in it. The source of the river in Burgundy is a spring-fed trout stream. We will fish it in May and hopefully will find a nice hatch of mayfly. Both François and Vincent have access to excellent trout fishing on the haute Seine.”

“Did salmon ever run up the Seine?”

“Yes, of course, all the rivers draining into the Atlantic in France had salmon. The run in the Seine was magnificent. The last one caught in Paris was in 1956.” Pierre stopped to carry Marlin up the steps to Pont Neuf again by the statue of Henri IV. “Well, who knows,” he continued, “maybe we will get one tomorrow morning. Maybe Guy and Jean-Pierre will join us. We'll fish until about nine in the morning and then we must go and set up for the fly-fishing
salon.
”

 

That night, I slept wrapped in a wool blanket on the floor of Pierre's office. At eight he knocked on the door, came in with his key, and woke me. “Well, we slept too late,” he said, standing over me, “but that's okay, I think. We have a long day ahead.” He looked at his watch. “We'll walk down to Ile Saint-Louis anyway, to see if Guy and Jean-Pierre caught anything. We'll leave the rods behind this morning.”

Guy and Jean-Pierre lived in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. A chef in a school cafeteria and a landscape worker in a cemetery, they supplemented their meager incomes by fishing most every weekday morning before work and selling their catches to local restaurants. As far as Pierre knew they were the only commercial fishermen in Paris, and illegal ones at that. Their most coveted catch was the zander—or, as Americans called it, walleye—a sweet, white-fleshed fish, although they also got a good price for eel,
silure,
and carp. Guy and Jean-Pierre could earn up to a third of their normal monthly incomes through their fishing.

Pierre and I walked along the Seine on the quai des Orfèvres to the façade of a newly renovated Notre-Dame cathedral, dim and ominous in the morning light. “They are wonderful fishermen, these guys,” Pierre told me of Guy and Jean-Pierre. “I met them four years ago fishing on Ile de la Cité. One of them had caught a ten-kilo zander. I couldn't believe it! So I started to follow them and fish with them and made a small film of their fishing. I gave Guy a cell phone to call me if they caught a big fish, and would ride my bicycle down to the river with my camera. I got them sponsorships through American fishing tackle manufacturers, so they have good free equipment. They mostly fish with worms and they are very skilled. It takes a great deal of skill to fish a worm correctly—as much as it does to fish a wet fly.”

At this hour of the morning Paris was quiet and the city belonged to the fishermen. The river was eggshell brown and made the limestone façades of the city buildings seem more luminous yellow and the zinc roofs a deeper gray. “They're out there, see?” Pierre said as we crossed Pont Saint-Louis to the île. The fishermen were two dark shapes on the tip of the island standing with their lines in the water.

“'
Jour
, Pierre,” one greeted as we approached them. They had caught a bream and killed it. It lay bloodied on the cobbles. I shook their hands.

“Well”—Pierre looked into the opaque water—“if the bream are here the
silure
should be too,” he said. We stayed and watched them for a half hour, after which time neither Guy nor Jean-Pierre had caught a fish, so we left to go set up booths at the fly-fishing exhibition.

 

The Salon de la Pêche à la Mouche was an annual fly-fishing exposition at the Espace Auteuil near the Bois de Boulogne in west Paris. Represented there were a hundred or more vendors from Austria, Belgium, France, Holland, and Iceland, selling everything from flies and fly rods, wine and swine, to antique salmon spears and trips to exotic destinations.

Pierre was certainly the prince of the show—everyone seemed to know him. He filmed and aired a weekly fishing program on French television and edited a fishing magazine called
Pêches Sportives.
When we got to the space, Carole, his wife, was setting up a booth with some of Pierre's antique tackle and fishing books. I was to help Pierre set up a kind of museum-style exhibit he'd prepared on the history of salmon fishing in France. During the course of the day, we drove several van loads of wares across town from rue Dauphine to the Espace Auteuil, including some sculptures by Pierre's friend François, which would be for sale in a small art gallery space.

As a consequence of our work, I met François Calmejane, the tax inspector–artist who had created the big iron sculptures of flies that hung in Pierre's apartment. He looked a bit like an inspector type with a bowler hat, a thick black mustache, and a Sherlock Holmes–style pipe with a deep curve in it. He was wearing a bright yellow shirt and a tie made of wood, and over that a vest of green ostrich leather. The hair on his head was a kinky dark brown. He held the pipe between his yellowed teeth as he spoke gently and affirmatively. “Just one moment, François,” Pierre called, seeing him try to lift a heavy sculpture by himself, “we're almost done; we can help move some things.”

“François, you know,” Pierre told me in confidence, “is one of
the top tax agents in France. He's busted a lot of big guys doing corrupt things. He takes four weeks of vacation every year; two of them he spends with his wife camping and fishing for trout in Ireland, the other two he spends making his art.”

I imagined the inspector up in the small attic space above his apartment that was his atelier, creating the visionary sculptures in a two-week orgasmic gesture from ideas and energies stored up for an entire year. At that time I didn't really have a sense of who François was. Though he seemed a little cold, I could say that I had never seen anything like these sculptures he had made. Clearly he had an obsession with fish, and when I had the opportunity to see his studio, I felt I would be walking into his mind, which would be strange but also familiar because I thought I might see a bit of myself in there.