Deja Vu

"It's okay… I am in Paris." I reply to the off-duty waitress who apologises to me for sitting with her back to me. The Sacré Coeur is cool inside, but at the time I visited it I was fatigued and overloaded with sights… so all I remember of it is that it was blue-cool and quiet… and maybe has really magnificent stained glass windows… or the blue-cool watery light contrasting with the bright hotness outside made it look like the most beautiful stained glass windows I had (have?) ever seen. Outside I commented to my dad, who seemed pleased to have force-marched the family up those ****ing forever steps, that a full-moon night would be the sanest time to walk up those steps. Twenty-two years and a couple of weeks more or less later and that dream has become a reality. The moon hangs out there in space… and looks like a sphere… a balloon… a ball… a majestic moerse fucking rock. The musicians who had been playing on the top wide landing of the broad section of stairs have left… (after the police came around to remind them of the time) … and all alone in that spot on a Paris night I marvel at the miracle of everything. When at last the magic of the eternal moment had slowly melted down to the reality of a fool on a hill in a mindless trance… I went in search of beer. The largest restaurant on the square in Montmartre was my third stop, and a jazz duo made me feel that small isn't always more cosy. The two small bars/bistro's… restaurants or whatevers I had been in had been a trifle boring. I asked a waiter to request a number that Stephane Grappelli, the French jazz violinist who had died earlier in the year, would have approved of. Fortunately, the waiter was fluent enough in English to relay the message… and the duo played one of the most beautiful pieces of jazz I have ever heard. They invited me over to their table and fortunately they, too, were fluent in English. I explained that a Stephane Grappelli tribute was aired on T.V. in South Africa when he died… and how I had enjoyed a show of his twenty-one years earlier… the very first time I had travelled into Cape Town and Sea Point on my own at night. They played more jazz numbers in their next set and it was magic… one of the best nights in my life. The full moon over the Sacré Coeur and Montmartre… and the sea of lights of Paris… and two French guitarists playing their impromptu tribute to the virtuoso violinist that Stephane Grappelli was… Outside, cats stopped prowling for mice for a while… despite the eerie light of the full moon. ------------ We arrived in San Theresa just in time to miss the market and whatever might have been happening there that morning. We wandered around amongst the most picturesque whitewashed houses and stone buildings in the dead quiet of a siesta that was hard and brittle as a clean white skeleton filled with a strong primal ghost that pushed us inexorably away from the town centre until we found the most beautiful little bay in all of the wide wonderful world. There is something very delicate and pristine about the closing of all the shutters in town, and the way the last people from the marketplace ambled home. The women were old and were dressed in serene black. Maybe me and Rick would have seen younger people if we had arrived earlier, but we were probably correct in assuming that the young people were all on the mainland and that the ghostly quality of life was a special visual moment between an old established life-style and a busy world happening in the cities… They were not catering for tourists, rather bearing with our presence either stoically or possibly uncomprehendingly. Where we accosted people packing up their wares we found some who expected our phrase-book Italian to make us understand them, and some who did not, until we happened upon a middle-aged woman with attentive looking black-brown eyes who directed us to a middle-aged man saying, "Engleez… Engleez… ", but he did not understand a helluva lot of Engleez… but he was helpful enough, with the woman close by, that we knew where to find the bus to the other port from where we were to go to Ostia. I cannot recapture more of the day than the whitewashed buildings and the stone buildings getting shut down in the heat of the afternoon and the slow, slow, very slow movement of the people quietly going indoors till everything was quiet as hell. At the bus station we found the bus and the driver and with our little Italian we got to understand that the bus would leave much later… And that is how we started wandering through this sleepy town to find our way to the most beautiful little beach in the world… and on it were people! In the hallowed quiet of a sunny Sardinian afternoon we found our way out of the awful silence of San Theresa during siesta to a beach where some holidaymakers and everyone who did not fit into the deathly quiet of the siesta seemed to be gathered. A cold-drinks vendor might have been on hand… or maybe not. The water was perfectly clear and a most welcome refuge from the heat. We played around in it joyfully for a while, but slowly came to the realisation that the afternoon was going to be long and went back to the beach to fetch our caps and wear them while swimming. We decided to wear T-shirts and also applied suntan oil to our necks and thought it good to have that soak into our skins while enjoying a cigarette before committing to a long long afternoon of leisurely swimming. It felt like we were swimming in a pool.