FLAMBEE DESSERTS - AN INSIGHT
FLAMBEE DESSERTS - AN INSIGHT
A local environment can be a lot of things. The skyline, built or evolved,
the air, friendly or not, the colour of the road, dry or wet; and the message,
mobile and Mcluhanesque, that is passing over it.
In New England, where I had spent some weeks of the summer, the roads are mostly asphalt. Pretty much black when they’re wet, more or less grey when they’re dry; except for the painted indications for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. For a visiting European the message passing over the tarmac is: organised mobility, even as an end in itself. Who cares where you’re going, the important thing is to displace. The means have become an event, the message a metaphor of itself.
I was over from France, with my two youngest children and my
girlfriend. After the organic roads of southern France where driving conduct has a less ritualistic and more purposeful mise en scène, it all seemed very calm. Comfortable, well maintained vehicles rolling softly by, cyclists profiting from the nearly flat landscape, squirrels casually leaving the tarmac to watch from a tree root. The American road is truly a means of communication: primarily with yourself. And to communicate you must breath out onto the tarmac, add your own graceful swirls to the dance, share the travelled-charged tunnels of transport that seem to envelope the highways and byways. Cars, bikes, prams, buses, dress-rails threaded with garments, hot-dog sellers, wheelchairs, taxis, roller blades, trucks of all types and sizes, including many fire engines, all slip along, like the programmed lights that scroll the announcements in Time Square.
At first, the omnipresence of fire engines was simply a visual bonus, an
extra from a TV series witnessed in the flesh, their electronic owl-like hoots
gouged through the ambient noises and thrilled, like some tribal call. But after a couple of weeks, their regular appearance began to amuse in a different way. There had been no apparent fires; there was no gossip of marooned animals or violence; the vehicles usually passed at a very slow speed with no display of urgency. Were they simply out there enjoying the ride, playing their part in the musical and ready to step to the front of the stage when the score called for a passage of fearful action and demonstration? It seemed like that.
When they were not on the road but parked up in their respective chapels, they could often be seen through the open doors, gleaming and bright and being made that way. Their stations are dressing rooms for these men and machines, who haul on the role of risk-harlots when needed.
Not that French firemen don’t look fitting - any group of people hanging
round those sort of machines and wearing protective clobber like that has got to be a show-stopper. And in the hot dry summers, especially in the scrubby
garrigues of the south, you can frequently see a team with their camion, talking and watching and waiting under the small grey-green heat-foxing leaves of the dull-trunked Languedocian trees. But normally, on an average day, you won’t see a camion pompier roll gently past your cave doors with a cheeky toot.
The summer heat-wave had been and gone by the time we returned to
France, having coincided with the one we had experienced on Rhode Island some weeks before. It was still pretty hot when we passed through Barcelona, but I was already in some trance-like state brought on by the travel-mildness induced from the air, food, temperatures, noises and other people of the last 24 hours; and by the anticipations of going back to my routines and my habitat, the sharing of routines with my kids and with my girlfriend. For two days an invalid automatic pilot ran my life. My children had gone to visit their mother, and I suddenly regained consciousness to find myself alone on a Friday night with my equally pilotless girlfriend; who also shared my equally pilotless hunger.
A Chinese restaurant in Montpellier was chosen for the emergency landing strip. It was quite late, quite quiet. In any case, we were in ground-rush-shock, heading helplessly towards normality.
At the end of the meal, having sifted through some of the happenings of
the last few weeks and having restored our bodies with some richly sauced potions, I think we felt somewhat ourselves, at least, less ambiguous than we had felt earlier. So much did I feel unambiguous that I acknowledged the need for a flambéed crispy pineapple dumpling. Which had been well doused in alcohol, inspiring gorgeous flames and drawing curiosity and admiration from our neighbour eaters. It was delicious! A warm sweet smell of caramel and alcohol was left hanging over the plate.
While we sipped the offered trou Sechuan, a distant Chinese relative of the trou Normand, I began to prepare myself for the Montpellier outside. There had been a continuous but sparse filing of passers-by in the alleyway which knotted past the restaurant’s thresh-hold, a thread of concrete and stone, tarmac and cracks, rubbish and holes, neither ancient nor modern. Beyond, nothing to remark; an occasional car-horn, an occasional explosion, both of them normal for a summer night in the south of France. So. If there is no alien night energy, perhaps a little stroll before sneaking the car out of its burrow.
Fifty yards from the restaurant’s door, the alleyway stopped and a fairly large place opened up, Les Halles off at the top end, bars and food shops on most sides, and the sculpture of Jean Jaurés in the middle, staring metallically across the night-baskers who sat on or glided between the aluminium chairs.
Where a street ran from the square down to La Place de La Comedie, a
natural funnel, the gliders seemed to have hovered, but not from congestion;
they were gathered around the squinting blue lights of a police car. An abnormal amount of smoke spilled idly through the air.
A meander through the confusion of tables and chairs led us to the scene.
After taking in what seemed to be a casual ribald exchange between the
pedestrians and a passing patrol car, we noticed a thin film of dark smoke
unrolling vertically from the gap at the top of the door to a shoe shop on the
corner of the descending street. Presumably the occupants of the police car were aware of the smoking doorway, certainly the crowd around their car were not being discreet about its presence; but no officer emerged to assess the situation. In fact the car edged carefully forward through the thickening throng, down past the burning shop wherein shafts of flamelight could now be seen, and stopped to the side of the street, away from the victim shop and allowing those coming from La Comedie to continue their ascent and join the firewatchers, for the flames could now be seen, flickering along the back wall of the shop display, silhouetting boots and shoes.
A concerned agitation darted among the spectators, as though they were involuntarily watching a shop commit suicide. A large man carrying a fire extinguisher returned to his snack bar, shrugging and dismissing, no one
knew what. Mobile phones were being held out to record the crackling interior
and the now billowing black smoke.
A second police car, and a third had arrived, six policemen stood looking
about, but it was impossible to tell what they were looking for: criminals,
firemen, a superior, a friend?
There were probably some criminals in the crowd, certainly no firemen, their superior at that moment was an atmosphere of urgency; and friendship had sunk with expectation.
Consternation, surprise, frustration animated the reeling mix of tourists, general Montpellerians, and folks of that quarter, these streets, ce coin. Glass shelving exploded in straight sharp sounds. The flames soared inside the shop and roared, choking the heat and energy out in vomits of streaming black smoke.
The police turned the upper parts of their bodies to survey the flittered faces and jerking arms, leaving their feet facing the fire, solidly placed. Heard the questions, the taunts, the insults and replied with words and looks from the books. There was no-one present to take control. Only the gorging light from the fire, the swallowing smoke, the staccato noise of shattering and shouting.
A man, talking aloud and pushing through the crowd, earnest, diving into the snack bar. Others arrived by side streets or behind the police cars, curious to discover a hundred or so people gathered together to watch a fire, but the earnest man has emerged from the deserted bar with the extinguisher in his hand, heading for the plate glass window on the busy side of the shop and activating the police at the same time. As he reaches the window and starts smashing at it with the extinguisher, two of the flics jump forward, calling at him and grabbing, and he couldn’t do it. Pushes and words, looks, pauses and looks, while the crowd jostles and shouts, spewing out a worn woman who screams at the police, kidnaps the extinguisher. I wandered onstage and asked the two activated policemen if
“…firemen existed? Where are they? Are they coming?”
Inside their synthetic jump-suits these officers looked confused, nervously calm, dismissive, like boys tending an awkward baby till mum gets back, not sure what to say to the stranger asking questions. Annoyed that someone should interfere with their fire. I took my girlfriends arm and we retired to the rear of the onlookers, exchanging words with a young man who was living the spectacle through his camera numerique
“I only bought this a week ago!”
Bravo! Quelle chance!
The front of the crowd rolls the ensemble backwards in reaction to a
violent eructation from the conflagration. An arc of orange flame is tearing from the doorway. The sirens of the fire-fighting crews get louder in the night, their engines squeezing through the sightseers, shining with fire-light.
The firemen and their materials were tragically earthbound, struggling close-by, ordinarily working, unloading reels of hosing, relays, axes, opening hatches in their trucks and gambling at the controls they discovered. Nothing here would fly at the fire. Only water was unrolled to slosh onto it, to dull the flames and enfury the billows of smoke.
Mysteriously, there were now about a dozen police standing around, men and women, all facing the culprit building with a hint of being a barrier between the celebrity and the admirers. Two firemen had gained the first floor and were attempting forceful entry. Onlookers infiltrated the clusters of police. Two tipsy men, sucking on cigarettes and plastic beakers joked with each other, with anyone, with three flics …
…what a fine mess! just look at that!
And the flics responded, grinned, nodded.
“Putain, that’s bloody years we’ve been waiting for something like this to happen…now perhaps they’ll put up a kebab shop or a pizzeria!”
And laughed.
In the manner of the others, like the spectators at a sports event that has been rained off, we ambled away, lightly, carefully, through twists of men and mechanics, the intestines of a glorious shining machine spilled out, my memories of gliding traffic sideshows deformed and charred, filtered through the event of the burnt shop.
This flaming shoe-shop, my second flambée. The others present had been suitably impressed by the event; but the sense of the evening, had left a smoke-dusty dampness hanging in the air that sat stale on the tongue. The taste of satisfaction, of fulfilment, of nothing could have been better presented, better organised, was somehow missing on the breath. And I remembered that I’d often discussed with others, how second helpings never, or rarely, seem as good as the first serving.