What was unusual, and in a way crazy, about my plan, was that I was going to France to simply “live” there. I had no job. I had no affiliation with any university program. At least I had the project of learning French. That would give me something concrete to which to devote my time and effort. My trans-Atlantic flight stopped in Reykjavík, Iceland. I got out of the plane, walked around the airport, and even ventured outside for a few minutes to breathe the far north air. It was much cooler than the heat wave that I had left behind in New York. Sitting next to me on the plane was Juan-Pablo Rivera from the South American nation of Columbia. He had changed planes at JFK Airport. Juan-Pablo was a couple of years older than me. He did not speak any English. Despite my two years of getting A’s in Spanish in high school, I could not really speak Spanish. Neither of us could say more than a few words in French. I quickly realized that Juan-Pablo was my literary alter ego. As far as I could make out, he was going to France for reasons very similar to my own. He had just graduated from his university in Bogotá. He was disillusioned with his country. He saw no future for himself there. He was passionately interested in French literature and philosophy. He wanted to connect with the post-1968 culture of le gauchisme.of the student movement. He wanted to learn French. After the plane landed, we said goodbye. But a few weeks later, I would by chance again encounter Juan-Pablo.
My immediate destination was Madrid, Spain. My ex-girlfriend Karen H., with whom I was still on friendly terms, had just done a “semester abroad” there. I would meet up with her in the Spanish capital and I would have her company for a week. My plan after that was to cross the border back into France alone. I did not know a single person in France. I had the address of a second cousin from New York named Jeffrey A. who was an expatriate and lived in Poitiers. I had never met Jeffrey but was considering contacting him at some point.
I made it from the Luxembourg airport to that city’s main train station. Then I took a train to the Gare du Nord in Paris. From there, I took the Métro to the Gare de l’Est, from where there were trains departing to Spain. Unfortunately, it was late at night and the next train was at about 6 AM. From midnight on, I sat quietly in a waiting room. I was afraid to fall asleep, fearful of possible theft of my small backpack or sleeping bag. I played chess for several hours with a male French university student. We could barely speak each other’s language.
The trip south through France the next day was exhilarating. It was an old rusting train. Much of the time, I was alone in a six-seat compartment. I had the window wide open. It was hot summer weather. The countryside was beautiful. There were fields and farming tracts as far as I could see. The loud noise of the train with the open window added to the palpability of the experience. I recklessly stuck my head out the window to feel the refreshing breeze. Only later would I take seriously the ubiquitous printed warnings to Ne pas se pencher au dehors. I am in Europe! I am in France! I am no longer in America! I shouted it out the window. It was the greatest feeling in the world.
We arrived in Irun, just over the France-Spain border. From there, I would get a train to Madrid. Spain’s longtime fascist dictator Francisco Franco had recently died in November 1975. The country was at the very beginning of its transition to democracy under the constitutional monarchy of King Juan Carlos I. At the Irun train station, there was a crowd of hundreds of travelers, many of them young people and hippies, mulling about in semi-panic and disorientation. There was a very long line to get to the three open ticket windows. It appeared that one would have to wait for hours to reach a sales counter. Several people told me that the ticket I had from Luxembourg to Madrid was only good for the slowest train that would take ten hours to get there and only departed a few times per day. To get on a faster train that departed more often and would reach Madrid in about five hours, one needed to buy a supplementary ticket. Moreover, it was not possible to pay the supplement on the train. There was a fast train leaving in about thirty minutes. I was standing together with about ten English-speaking young people (Americans, British, Australians) on their way to Madrid. The group decided to just get on that next train and see what would happen. It was late afternoon. No one had the patience to wait in the long queue to buy the supplementary Madrid ticket.
I took a seat next to a window in a second-class car. Soon a conductor came by. He looked at my ticket, shook his head in anger, and shouted at me in Spanish. He motioned for me to stand up and grab my stuff. He led me to the narrow space between two cars. It was clear that he was going to kick me off the train at the next local stop in the middle of nowhere. He came back moments later with a second supplement-less truant fish he had caught. Then a third and a fourth. He stood guard patiently over us. We assumed he didn’t understand English, especially if we talked fast, so we plotted among ourselves. When the train stopped at the next backwater pueblucho, we would get out, run as fast as we could two or three cars back, then hop on again. Then we would disperse and try to become invisible. The sense of adventure of what we were doing was as much of a motivation as the practical reasons.
I took a seat again. No conductor came by until about twenty minutes before Madrid. I almost made it without further trouble. But not quite. I couldn’t escape another checking of my ticket and soon a different conductor was scolding me loudly in Spanish. Now he was willing to let me pay the supplement on the train, whereas that had not seemed possible before. But the next problem was that I did not have any Spanish pesetas. I had been planning to buy some as soon as I got to Spain. But, on top of everything else, it was Sunday, and the currency exchange office at the Irun train station had been closed. I offered the angry conductor U.S. dollars or French franc, but that only made him angrier. Finally, a generous Spanish man witnessing the scene resolved the situation by paying my ticket supplement for me. I thanked him profusely and offered him U.S. dollars as reimbursement, but he refused to take money from me.