My Beautiful Bus. Jacques Jouet

Française and Larousse, still recognize the spelling “carrabat”) as a possible distortion of “char-à-banc,” an open-topped public transportation wagon with bench seats, like the wagon that was used during the Age of Enlightenment to load twenty people in Paris and bring them on a four-and-a-half-hour-long trip to Versailles.

      In turn, the Parisian Regional Transportation Authority (RATP) circulated an advertising leaflet in 1986 to promote its late-night buses, using the slogan, “After midnight, don’t go home in a pumpkin anymore.” Anyway, hop on!

Pshshshsh . . .

      For Basile, “on time” always means early. He’s always itching to know what time it is. Managing time is his purpose in life. That schedule to follow. Those kilometers to cover while staying focused on the minutes: to not be late, or too early. Ever since his first days in the driver’s seat, he has always seen the steering wheel as a clock: “Hold the steering wheel with your hands at a quarter past nine or at 10:10.” His arms have become the hour and the minute hand.

      On the dashboard, no bobble-head dolls slide around, no pin-up or dried flower hangs from the rearview mirror, no family photo, no Saint Christopher medallion or any other miraculous coin. I see Basile as a sober sentimentalist who keeps his affections secret and who has never felt hatred.

      The world is at his feet and unfurls beneath them. Floating, Basile slurps up the ribbon of the road. In the rearview mirror, he gazes at the road gone by in the same way you might contemplate faraway stars on a clear night: the image seen is ancient. It goes by too quickly, or not quickly enough. The good-bye to his wife standing in their little yard where she cares for the roses—too quickly. Not quickly enough—the newly plowed plains where nothing grows yet, at least to the naked eye. If he wanted to, he could, on demand, relive the best days of his life. It wouldn’t take long to add them up.

      Basile isn’t an unhappy man. He’s conscious of his fragility. To force the contrast of an exception, like tossing a stone in calm water to make things out more clearly, I presume that he carries an old wound, a small preoccupation that pulls at him like a void—might it be taking him over?—a wound he himself has patiently invented a method for coping with.

The engine warms up. The bus is ready. Basile backs it slowly out of the garage. He makes his way across the sleeping town, squeezing through the narrow streets. Oh, the mill is quiet! In a series of delicate maneuvers and turns whose geometry he knows by heart, he brushes by heavy stone façades and shutters that are still closed. Here and there, a kitchen timidly chooses the right moment to light up.

      Everything is dark, cold, and hungry.

      Basile parks his bus at the little square. The cafe is lit up. Three regulars have already started their day, sitting like pillars, hunched over with their elbows glued to the bar.

      Pshhhh . . .

      While Basile goes in to sip a large black coffee and eat a slice of toast, the bus’s engine continues to warm up. The passenger door is left open for air circulation, in the front, on the right. Anyone could hop on.

And so we hopped on, aspiring to act as a witness, wanting to sit back and observe. We, being of royal blood, but disguised as a commoner again, as a clandestine passenger of the bus, have decided to get on for amusement, with the purpose of experiencing, without an intermediary, those we represent, calmly and harmlessly observing, giving in to the archetype of the story-book prince who doesn’t know how to rule and so takes to the streets, the souk, the marketplace, dressed like one of his subjects. The royal we, meaning I, and may it also mean you, bus specter, I hollowed out from a true I, if it’s true that in the tutelary shadow of Julio Cortázar’s Cosmoroute and in Gu Menda (Lino Ventura)’s trip down to Marseille in Le Deuxième Souffle [The Second Breath] by Jean-Pierre Melville,⁴ I linked Embrun and Varengeville-sur-Mer alone by bus in nine days, from the 11th to the 19th of November, 1988, of course it was an intentional stroll, but I never succumbed to the clichéd role of the wanderer, approximately 1200 kilometers, only the points of departure and arrival were explicitly set, the stops in between being determined by the caprices of exhaust pipes, but nevertheless subject to my rule of no trains, no taxis, no hitchhiking, and no car rentals: Gap, Grenoble, Valence, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Le Puy-en-Velay, La Chaise-Dieu, Arlanc, Vichy, Monluçon, Châteauroux, Blois, Orléans, Dreux to Saint-André-de-l’Eure was an exception (twenty-five km on foot), Évreux, Rouen, Saint-Valery-en-Caux, Varengeville-sur-Mer, all for a total of 685.20 francs in bus fares, room and board, some other standard knickknacks, and nothing really special to say about it all. It was a trip without surprises. Nothing happened. There was nothing to do except stick to the rule and try to observe, which made the trip an ordinary one. What disappointment, then, must be hiding behind the title, My Beautiful Bus! Unless a thousand things already seen and considered silently fuse with the storeroom of accumulated scenes separate from the trip. For the organized trip doesn’t rule out the unexpected. Instead it reaps the false unexpected, the exotic unexpected, the sort that you find in twenty different guidebooks whose same twenty lines compete to predict the unexpected, including the level of surprise and admiration that’s required of you, if you are worthy. The organized trip shifts perspective only slightly. Which isn’t to say, however, that I will resign myself to merely describing this shift.

      We, I, who am certainly Carabas deep down, Carabas lured by his homonym noun, this simple peasant Carabas having become a fat and languid king—happiness isn’t as beautiful as the pursuit of happiness—adorned with all the ridiculousness that the proverbial meaning of the largely obsolete noun conjures: a carabas is a fake nobleman, a pretentious arriviste who quickly becomes infatuated with his title . . . Carabas, having renounced his duties, set on questioning, incognito, the lowly parts of the world to find out what’s really been learned, what the people of his kingdom are thinking. Wouldn’t it be something if it just so happened that, plain and simple, my subjects didn’t give a damn about the Koran, compared to turning forty? Or perhaps I can observe how they nourish themselves with pure wine and love, and how they cope with their romantic troubles. Like my own potential problem, for example, the one that would arise if the queen were to find out that I’m clearly a peasant, and, feeling betrayed, throw me out.

      How does the common world live through its troubles? How do others go about loving, and how do they handle love when it trembles at its foundations? Can I learn something from their example?

Our invisibility in the bus, a gap, the hollow I like a fly whose veins have been sucked dry by a garden spider and who, in a nightmare, becomes a vampire, a Dracula, which means that it can now take its turn drinking the blood of others, this kind of fictional character (especially when he’s the narrator), is zombie-like. If it looks like blood is flowing through his veins, it’s really just water dyed red. While watching the Disney Channel yesterday, I giddily jotted down an implicit reflection on this I character: in the Walt Disney version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Scrooge McDuck is Scrooge, Donald is the nephew, and Mickey is Bob Cratchit. But Mickey also plays Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on Goethe . . . I immediately found myself imagining Mickey Mouse as Puss in Boots, a beautiful contradiction that might pass unnoticed given the strange role that this sort of character plays. (It would be the same sort of alchemy if Charlot—not his American persona, Chaplin—were to play Jesus, for example.) He isn’t exactly an actor playing a character, because this actor is already a character, but more precisely a multidimensional character, who’s nevertheless still contained by the dimensions of his sort, loosely employed, readily hosting an array of characters in his mold. There’s something similar about my narrator, I. He has to be a stereotype, a jack-of-all-trades, capable of seeing everything and being in every situation, without ever failing to keep a distance, the least burdened as possible, from the author’s idiosyncrasies, refusing to give in to them or at least resisting them as much as possible. But this can’t be done. An author doesn’t know how to hide himself behind his characters. Instead he shows himself naked through them, and rhymes with them all.

      And so I’ve embarked. Which seat should I pick? The one that’s best for stretching my legs or the one best suited for propping my knees up at eye