Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger by Kelly Cogswell Page B

of ridiculousness to break apart the gray, gray stone. Give me Dada instead of the Enlightenment any day, I thought. Give me bicycle tires and broken nudes. No wonder the students had risen up. And before them the sansculottes. My god, I missed the wilderness of New York but tried not to show it.
    Okay, so maybe I told Ana a little of what I felt.
    Maybe after a couple days of gray stones and tidied gardens I ranted and raved and threw myself on the slippery cobblestones and foamed at the mouth. Until we went to that demo.
    America had its David Duke; France had Jean-Marie Le Pen, lawyer, legislator, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant Holocaust denier, ex-foreign legionnaire, and maybe a torturer. His rallying cry was “France for the French,” and traditional values. Some lefty group was holding a protest against the racism he incited. Ana and I picked up a tube of white acrylic paint, a brush, and a dry black umbrella. Riding the metro, I painted a bomb in the center and lettered in French around it, Lesbian Avengers [Les Justicières Lesbiennes] Against Racism. It was the first thing that made me really happy in France, painting that umbrella on the subway while the riders looked on. At the demo, one or two nodded in acknowledgment, but nobody said anything. They’re polite, those French people. So discreet.
    Go to something about racism in New York, it’s mostly people of color with a few whites tossed in. In Paris, there were black people, Asians, North Africans, plenty of whites. All speaking French like they owned the language. And I realized, like Le Pen, I’d thought of France as a white place, though it hadn’t been since the Gauls painted their faces blue and greased their hair. It rained, of course. I held the umbrella high.
    Afterwards, Ana took pity on me and booked two places to the Côte d’Azur, which was my first trip ever on a real train if you don’t count those commuter things to Philly. There were bunk beds, like in the movies. Porters. Heading south, we shot through the damp countryside arriving in Nice after dark. Greeted by an enormous and terrifying dog, we slept that night in a small hotel, with thick moldy curtains, and the sound of waves crashing on an invisible beach. When we woke in the morning, and Ana pulled open the windows, we were blinded with light and ran outside like two mental patients. What an incredible and strange blue the sky was. What a strange green the sea. They were the colors of Matisse. Colors I thought were made up. How come no one had told me? Ana laughed when I grabbed her hand and didn’t let go.
    We moved to a hotel on the Promenade des Anglais that had a cut-rate Christmas special. Our new room had a balcony overlooking the bay, and a minibar, which I’d never seen before. Below, there was a fisherman among the enormous rocks in the crook of the bay. The waves would hit him and spray shoot up fifteen feet. A couple of people actually swam. There were others in chairs on a beach made only of pebbles, which I’d never seen before, either. We went down and slid around on the stones. Later, we walked up a path to a park where they had all these strange desert plants. Some had the smooth, thick leaves of aloe. Others were cactusy and prickly.
    We stumbled over an old cemetery up there filled with Americans who’d come from Cincinnati when it was an important center of American culture, and San Francisco just a dirty little port town. There were worse places to die, I thought. Later, we found an enormous eternal market with fifty stalls selling masses of cut flowers, and dozens others with olives that were flavored with orange or garlic or burning peppers. At an outdoor restaurant, we ate soupe au pistou, which was full of vegetables and no meat. I could understand some of the French because they pronounced it more like Italian or Spanish. They also had their own Niçard dialect, which had outlasted the Genoese, Saracens, Sardinians, even the French kings.
    I decided it