I meet Victor on a train somewhere between Toulouse and Carcassonne. It’s a hot, sticky Friday, and I feel as though I’ve been shuffling through one metal detector after the next since I left Boston.
Note to self, do not leave just two hours between flights in London if needing to re-check bags. No matter how friendly and adorable the man at the immigration counter is, there are mishaps. And so, one suitcase short, I’ve arrived in what seems like a deserted Toulouse, that is, until I enter the madness of Matabiau train station.
I arrive to board my train just in the nick of time. I blame the SNCF though, because theplatform had changed from 1 to 7 to blank and then finally to 8.
I find the first open door and “oui oui” my way onto the Narbonne to Avignon 16:55 at precisely 16:59. A few people stand stoically in between cars, while I file onwards in search of an empty seat and watch fields of wheat and poppies rush against us. I come to a man, probably around 60 (I would later learn he is 62), large, whitehaired and serious, whose blazer and satchel occupy an empty seat.
I don’t need to ask for the seat, merely making eye contact. He gets up and frees the seat on the aisle for me. After a brief silence, I ask him where he’s from and when he says the US, I ask more, assuming that he is the sort of American traveller who enjoys banter.Victor, with his long nose and vividly grey eyes, had lived in Boston years before me, attending Northeastern as a young Israeli exchange student. He studied some sort of light science, describing to me in inane detail how many colours the human eye can perceive and how the colours have to be attenuated on mobile phones and computer screens to accommodate the neurological limitations of homo sapiens. This, he tells me, has been his life’s work.He lives in Arizona now, Phoenix to be exact, and finds the warm, stolid air and wide open space comfortable. I ask him what it’s like for him to be an American travelling abroad these days, and he shrugs.“I have been in eight countries in the past 12 days. I go from office to hotel to train to airport. It’s just business,” he says. He looks outside at the pastures and hayrolls. I am watching him watch the landscape as he asks me what we, the “rest of the world”, think about “this clown”.
I tell him people are scared, worried, disillusioned.
“I’m a Republican,” he says. “But I think Trump is a lunatic, I hope he gets impeached, but it makes no difference if the government won’t listen.”
I ask him if, at exactly twice my age, he thinks this is the worst it’s been.
“I was born in Israel,” he replies. “There is no best or worst. Just one loud man after the next.”
In the distance, the medieval city of Carcassonne comes into view, a majestic grey fortress towering above a small town whose pinkish red rooftops are nestled amid a blanket of pine trees and farmland.He asks me about South Africa. There are no abbreviations, no swear words, no tenor.
Just a stream of earnest statements and questions.
Days later, I wander through the medieval lanes of La Cité du Carcassonne. I walk the perimeter of the old city, stopping occasionally to peer into the gardens of the families that still live within its walls.
I see a train speed by and think of Victor. I think about his almost smile when he talked about lasers and the colours. I can hear him say it, in that mild, pendulous measure: “As it happens, the human eye can actually see seven million colours.”
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