A few months prior, I had met an old French man on a train who told me I was doing the right thing. Always eager to hear more about that topic, I listened intently.
Europe from a Backpack
April 2004
Guise, France
?Have you been here before?? I asked in French.
?Non. C?est la premi?re fois,? he responded with my favorite answer: no, first time.
?Bon. On y va?? and we were off. Out of their view, I smiled to myself in triumph, for only I knew I was living a dream.
?Le Ch?teau fort de Guise a connu, au cours de la premi?re moiti? du vingti?me si?cle ?? I rambled on about the history of the castle. The castle I was living in. The castle in France where I gave tours to French tourists about the history of their own country, their own castle.
A few months prior, I had met an old French man on a train who told me I was doing the right thing. Always eager to hear more about that topic, I listened intently. At my age, he said, I should be living and seeing all that I could see while I still had my youth, my health, my energy. He said that he was old and he could see things more clearly now that it was all behind him. He said that I should live in foreign countries and learn foreign languages. That I?d learn more about my own country now that I?d left it, that I could see things more clearly if I wasn’t so close to them. I tried to scribble in my memory. He regretted not having lived the life he dreamt of and it was too late for him to be young. He didn’t blame himself, he didn’t blame anyone; it was just the choices he had made. In some way, I was learning about the life he had lived ? and the life he didn’t. Later, he said, I?d have time to earn lots of money and have a family, a car and a house. ?Two houses maybe!? he exclaimed. But later. Now, I needed to have freedom, he said, freedom from the future.
I didn’t completely understand everything he said, as it was in French and he was very old and spoke with a thick accent, but I was riveted by his every idea. He was a philosopher and I was his pupil. He wore polished shoes and an old plaid jacket, he looked distinguished. I wanted the man to adopt me. He smoked terrible cigarettes that smelled like burnt earth, but it just added to his authenticity. I wanted my own father to believe in what I was doing and not push me so hard to get the job, move up the career ladder, buy a house. I would do all that, I knew I would. I was twenty-one. I had time. I had my youth. I had to get off at the next stop, but I wanted the train trip to last forever.
?Les souterrains?? I repeated. The tourists at the castle always asked about the underground tunnels, especially the kids. I told them how the castle had hundreds of kilometers of secret passageways leading out to nearby villages. They were used when the castle was attacked by invading armies, I told them. The kids always wanted to go into them, but I pretended that it was too dangerous and dark and spooky, which just made them all the more excited. So I brought the family down into the opening of one of the tunnels with my flashlight lighting the way, walked in just enough to where it was darker than night, then turned off my flashlight. The kids sometimes screamed, sometimes just went silent, but it was all they talked about after the tour was over.
They were the tourists, I was the local.
I?d been living in the castle for just over a month as a volunteer for the Club du Vieux Manoir, a group that engaged foreign students to restore old monuments. I had found their address in a book on volunteerism. I wrote, they replied, I arrived. I was studying its history, giving tours of the underground tunnels, chopping back the rose bushes with a machete when we didn’t have any visitors. I chopped a lot of rose bushes.
The first question I asked the tourists was if they had been to the castle before. It was an important question because I got some real historians in there once in a while and they?d catch me on the little stuff. The old men liked to test my knowledge of the castle, but I managed. I studied like a madman ? then I learned from the old men. This time, the mother broke up the interrogation by asking where I was from, because she noticed my accent, and that got us off the topic of the castle and onto the topic of me ? which was far easier to talk about, vocabulary-wise.
?Ooh, cheri,? she said to her husband, ?Our little Pierre could go and live in the United States and do a volunteer program like this young man is doing, non??
Other people talked about living in another country. People talk about doing lots of things they?d like to do. I was doing them.
I was reading Don Quixote at night by dim candlelight. I learned how to make a stained-glass window. I ate warm baguettes with fresh jam in the mornings and each day I felt like a prince. The prince of the castle. I wasn’t the king; he had too many responsibilities; I was the prince.
The old man on the train said that usually youth is wasted on the young. He shook his head. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes with a seriousness that scared me, but that I admired. He said that I wasn’t wasting my youth. He was old, he was history, he knew things. I was young, I knew nothing in comparison. I was all alone talking to an old man on a train in France, rolling through the countryside like a ?50s black and white film. I couldn?t think of a place I?d rather have been. I shivered with pride as if a pretty girl said she liked me, but that seemed so trivial compared to these discussions. I wanted to video tape the whole thing so that I would have a record of someone, a respectable someone, telling the world that I was doing the right thing. I thought hard about what he said; I turned it over in my mind. I tried to plan the rest of my life according to how I would feel about it when I was the old man in the train talking to the young boy.
?Mais cherie,? the tourist?s husband answered, ?it is very expensive to do such a thing.” He thought a moment. Aand the visa, the paperwork ? bah!? He huffed and raised his eyebrows and curved his lips, as the French do so well, and that was the end of the discussion.
?Mais non, ce n?est pas vrai? ? I started, but the husband wasn’t really listening any longer. I looked to the mother, she looked to her husband, then back at me and she smiled politely. I wanted to tell him that it didn’t have to be so expensive, where there?s a will there?s a way and all that.
It was a simple matter of priorities, what you wanted. I chose not to have a car, I didn’t have a job waiting for me, I left my friends back home, but none of it mattered. Maybe he didn’t want to hear the reasons because he didn’t really want his little Pierre to do it. That was fine, he didn’t need to do it, not everyone needs to live in a foreign country, not everyone needs to go after their dreams ? or do they?
?Le ch?teau ? ? I continued my stories of the castle. The boy wanted to see the dungeon, and there we all talked about the prisoners who were trapped inside the thick walls for years and years. Trapped alone with their thoughts of their past, their present and their future ? but with little choice about the present.
Bradley Charbonneau can hardly remember the high-paying corporate job he got a few years later, but the old man on the train and a few months living in a French castle were worth any rungs of the corporate ladder he may have missed. He later managed to find a balance between living for the moment and paying the rent, and is currently shopping a narrative nonfiction book about a yearlong love story through Africa and Asia. He also works as a branding consultant in San Francisco. His website is www.bradleycharbonneau.com.