A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain Read Free Book Online Page B

way, only smiled, a giddy inability to put into words what we both were feeling. Just standing there on the platform, I felt for a brief moment as if it really were 1966 again. The bare telephone pole that I’d shimmied up as a kid to win a chocolate bar during the Fête du Port was still there in the square in front of the station. The port, with its sagging moorings and old-style pinasses (flat-bottomed fishing boats), the oyster boats, the two-story cinder-block and stucco homes with their red tile roofs – all looked exactly the same.
         Shoulder to shoulder, we strolled down empty streets under a cold gray sky, doing our best to ignore a quiet mist of rain. ‘It’s this way,’ said Chris in a hushed voice. ‘Past the fire station and the gendarmerie.’
         ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it.’
         We found rue Jules Favre just where we’d left it, and after one block, then two: our house. Or what used to be our house. The driveway had changed. It being winter, there were no roses blooming in the front garden beyond the hedges. The wooden shed to the right, where my father had posed for a photograph as a little boy – in beret and short shorts – where my brother and I later posed (in the same much-hated outfits), was still there. But the swinging gate we’d leaned upon, trying desperately to look cool, or at least less ridiculous, was gone. The house where our neighbor, the oyster fisherman, Monsieur Saint-Jour, had lived had been torn down and a new home erected in its place. The house my uncle Gustave had begun before his death (I remembered clearing bricks with him) was much the same. Beyond a new white picket fence and well-trimmed hedges stood our old summer home. There were a few seconds of stillness as Chris and I peered over the gate.
         ‘That was my room,’ said Chris, pointing to a window on the second floor.
         ‘Mine was across the hall,’ I whispered.
         ‘Yeah. You got the better one.’
         ‘I’m bigger.’
         ‘Tante Jeanne and Oncle Gustave were downstairs there.’
         ‘Why are we whispering?’ I muttered.
         ‘Should we knock on the door?’
         ‘You go. Your French is better. I want to see the back garden.’
         My brother hesitantly approached the house and rang the bell. Soon, the current owner emerged, a short older man, completely unfazed by the appearance of two tall, goofy-looking Americans and a camera-toting TV crew in the middle of winter. After a brief chat with Chris, he agreed to let us look over the old place, leading us around the side, through an old gate, to the rear patio and garden area, where Chris and I had played as kids: trapping lizards, exterminating snails, re-creating D-Day with our little army men. Beyond a low wall was a table where Tante Jeanne had served us salade de tomate , potato omelettes, steamed mussels, sautéed sole, buttery haricots verts , those big bowls of hot chocolate, and Bananya. The hand-cranked water pump was gone, and the old well from which it drew long plugged. The chipped ceramic pitcher we’d had to fill before visiting the outhouse was, of course, no longer there, but the outhouse still stood, and the compost heap behind it. Next to it, the lone American-style bathroom in southwest France, which my mother had insisted on building. Next to that, the outdoor fish kitchen and shed, where I’d stashed my Kronenbourgs and cigarettes as a twelve-year-old. The stone archway and heavy wooden door were still there, leading to a back alley. And around front, the garage, where my uncle had kept a 1930s Citrön sedan up on blocks, and his wine cellar – much the same. The garden was all grass now.
         ‘Think there are still little plastic army men buried in there?’ I asked.
         ‘Unquestionably,’ said Chris. ‘Probably still raise a company at least.’
         We didn’t go inside. It would have been too . . .