Fly-Fishing the 41st by James Prosek Read Free Book Online

at salmon and tarpon with miniature bows. The faces on the cherubim were those of Pierre’s fishing cronies, a cast of diverse characters that I would come to know over the next several months.
    The more I looked around the room, the more it began to live and breathe. The long, slender, and thick-shafted pike gnashed their teeth from the wall, but with glazed and blind eyes. Two of the iron insects flew about, flapping their chain-saw wings, spreading their shadows on the blood-and-urine-colored walls. Pierre’s wild children, seated at lunch upstairs before a painting of an animal’s vulva, were a product of this place, this womb-room, this dangerous erotic playground, never certain whether to take the comfort of the couch or to flee the grotesque assemblage of anatomy and art.
    When I thought we could go no deeper in the old brothel, Pierre took me down a small stair into what he called the cave, a small basement made warped and Gaudi-like by centuries. The cave was his fishing room, thick with feathers and flies, hand-forged fishing spears, and all manner of materials worthy of a creative inferno. Hundreds of fishing rods leaned up against the ancient mortar wall,resembling in a row the baleen of a whale’s maw. In this catacomb, a lifetime of angling detritus rested. “So,” said Pierre, turning off the light, “I think we should eat a little, and then I’ll show you where we fish in the Seine.”
    T HE I LE DE LA C ITÉ AND L E S ALON DE LA P ÊCHE À LA M OUCHE
    P apa, Papa!” cried little Marlin, looking up toward his father. “No, we cannot bring the fishing rods,” said Pierre. Pierre hoisted Marlin onto his shoulders and we walked in under the drizzle to Pont Neuf and down to the place du Vert Galant over wet cobbles to the tip of Ile de la Cité.
    â€œThere are two islands in the river here in Paris,” Pierre explained, “Ile Saint-Louis and here on Ile de la Cité. These are the two best places to fish. When the river is in flood the fish stack up in the eddy downstream of the island where the current is broken. There are probably five hundred bream here. They especially don’t like current, and at times the big silure come to feed on them. You would not believe, but you will see! They open their giant mouths and eat a four-pound bream whole. While you were skiing, my friends Jean-Pierre and Guy hooked eight off Ile Saint-Louis. They landed one that was about thirty kilos and lost one they said would have been nearly fifty—that’s a hundred and ten pounds!”
    West of where we stood was the metal walking bridge, the Pont des Arts, and on the Left Bank, the Musée d’Orsay, on the right, the Louvre. Upstream were Ile Saint-Louis and Notre-Dame, whose bells indicated it was well into the afternoon.
    â€œThis is the most beautiful pool in the world,” Pierre proclaimed, passing Marlin to me as he climbed over a rail, “and the fishing gets better every year. The Seine was very much polluted in the sixties and the only fish that lived here, if any, were the carp and eel. Now there are thirty-eight species in downtown Paris. I only started catching silure two years ago, small ones. This is the first year we have caught such monsters.”
    â€œAnd you eat them?” I asked Pierre.
    Pierre looked at me through his glasses, raising his gnomish nose and scratching his wavy hair. “Oh, yes, we eat them.” He smiled as if to assure me that I would eat them too. “The Seine is clean; in a year or two my friend André insists he will swim in it. The source of the river in Burgundy is a spring-fed trout stream. We will fish it in May and hopefully will find a nice hatch of mayfly. Both François and Vincent have access to excellent trout fishing on the haute Seine.”
    â€œDid salmon ever run up the Seine?”
    â€œYes, of course, all the rivers draining into the Atlantic in France had salmon. The run