WOID XVII-14 and 15: Our Friend the Bus

Friday, June 15, 2007 10:04 am

France is overall divided into three parts: those who know what they're doing, those who don't, and those who tell others what to do. Those who tell others what to do are rarely seen in France except on TV when it's time again to choose those who will tell others what to do for the next five years. As for the other two, those who know what they're doing and those who don't, it's hard occasionally to tell them apart, especially when neither shows. You'd think the confusion had ended as to who was who, because a new teller-in chief, a certain Monsieur Sharkeau, had just been elected. If that's what you think you just don't know.

We'd been waiting at the bus stop in Malijai, which we assumed to be the right stop because that's where the bus schedules were posted; but after asking a few locals who told us they weren't from the neighborhood and didn't know for sure we figured out the bus must have stopped at the other bus stop since it was already past the time when the bus would have stopped at the first bus stop if it was going to stop at the first bus stop to begin with. In other countries you'd simply think the bus was late, but in France the buses don't run late.

That is, in France the buses don't simply run late, whereas in Germany the buses simply don't run late. In Germany the trains cannot be conceptualized as runnning late because the computerized schedule tells you they don't. So you buy a ticket from Berlin to Strassburg-am-Rheim that will take you across Germany in four hours with three changeovers on the way, each one leaving you three minutes to change trains and platforms. Should you (not the train) be late by more than three minutes at any one changeover, it takes another five hours to get where you are already according to the schedule. Your fault if you can't quite live up to the Trainegorical Imperative. In France, if you happen to be late it's more interesting. Actually this has little to do with philosophical traditions and a lot with the fact that the German railway system has been privatized whereas the various French systems of transportation are in the process of being privatized. In Germany there is no ghost in the machine because the machine is the ghost; in France...

So we headed back into Malijai, through the dusty square and back across the bridge to Bus Stop Number Two, where Driver Number Two turned up on schedule and sold us tickets for La Brillane where, according to my own schedule, we'd catch a third bus back to Avignon. As we got off I asked the driver if this was the right stop for the bus to Avignon, because I'd noticed on the way in a few days earlier that the bus from Avignon stopped in La Brillane at the train station, not in front of the Café du Commerce around the corner.

No idea, the driver said. Call the Office.
I did, I said. They didn't know.
Did you speak to a man?
Yes, I said.
That was the boss, he said. Talk to the secretary.

Now that explains everything: the third category (the Transcendental Boss) was clueless.

When you bake a loaf of bread there are numerous imponderables: the quality of the water, the amount of armwork you put into the pétrin, the amount of air as well, the kneading after the second rising. There are many factors to consider, and each will take years, perhaps centuries of experience and practice to reach a stasis, by which time you will have forgotten long ago what made each one so crucial: no wonder the boss thinks it's easy, there's no one to tell him. For the right bus to be taken, likewise, there must be people sitting at the café by the bus stop who have seen the bus come and go, and who know to tell you that, yes, the bus stops here for there. These people, moreover, must be the type that likes to show they know the buses well, having lived or pretending to have lived in this town for many generations. Your average small town in France usually has several competing cafés around the square where the buses stop; the first one's called the Café du Monde and the second Café de l'Univers, and if you want to find out where the buses leave go to the one with the customers who look like real French people - Sharkeau voters, in fact. If you want good food you're probably better off at the other café, where the waiters wear spandex and the boss has dark shades pushed up on his head. Why the people in the first café would vote for someone who's going to put the bus stop on the highway out of town where there are no cafés at all, is beyond me.

At any rate there were no customers at the Café du Commerce in La Brillane but the owner was certain the bus stopped there, and that was the end of that because café owners make it their business to know this kind of thing, or else what's the point of paying good money for a café license next to the bus stop? Indeed, Bus Number Three stopped at the right spot at the right time, and we got our tickets to Avignon, scheduled to drop us off in front of the railway station for the high-speed line to Paris, with half-an-hour to spare. They order these things well in France.

Sunday, June 17, 2007 11:33 am

Had Jean-Paul Sartre been up front behind the driver he would have found good material for reflexion, except we were already sitting there and there was no room for him. What the revolutionary wants, Sartre wrote, is for those relationships of solidarity he maintains with other workers to become the very model of human relationships. After a friend of hers got on at Forcalquier the driver went on chatting from there to Cavaillon, mostly about the relationships she maintained with various human customers, and with the boss as well. As with all revolutionaries there was no clear line from theory to praxis, except that theory involved an endless line of bitching and praxis involved the opposite. Work, according to Sartre, offers freedom to the extent that if affirms the existence of real, material relations, by which he meant, I think, the forms of pre-sociable relations. Thus reality consists in resistance to politesse, the world of bourgeois relationships.

In theory the driver was a regular rabble-rouser; in practice she was a pussycat - a rabble-rousing pussycat, a Meow-ist. She hated - hated! those people who'd get on and she'd never seen them before and they happened to have left their money at home but hey, driver, just remember me, I'll pay you next time, and then they never showed again and by then you'd already issued them a ticket and you had to cover it from your own pocket. Why didn't they just tell the driver they didn't want to pay and save her the expense?

At least why didn't they wait until the next stop? A woman signaled at the turnoff to Bonnieux, and got on, and wanted to buy a ticket. Why don't you wait until the next stop, it's right around the corner, said the driver.They've got this stupid fare system now, and if I sell you your ticket after the curve it'll save you a lot of money.

Last week, she said, a man in Oraison had given her a package to be dropped off for his friend in Forcalquier. Nobody turned up at the bus stop, though, and after a while she drove off, and meanwhile the man was in across the street, having a glass of wine. The nerve, she said - he expected me to come and drop off the package at the bar; who am I the maid?

On the other hand, according to Jean-Paul, There is unity between the conception of the materialist revolutionary and that of his oppressors. The boss was a bus driver himself, and he'd bought into the latest privatization scheme coming out of the big know-nothings in Paris. The profitable part of the operation was the regular scheduled school pick ups and drop offs, a captive audience of underage passengers - no trouble, except, the driver said, you saw the same people on the same route, day after day. No friction. The less profitable was the little old ladies and the folks without cars who needed to catch a bus from Digne to Manne. The least profitable of all was the tourists, because tourists don't usually have a son-in-law who works at the café where the bus driver stops so the in-law can remind the driver to pick up mémé and get her to the appointment. Tourists, the driver said. They go to La Brillane, and wait at the train station instead of the café, and then they call the boss to complain when I don't pick'em up. What am I, some kind of a charity?

By then we were between Bonnieux and Cavaillon. On our right sprinted the low-lying mountains of the Luberon, which I'm told were beautiful once, until the world was told how beautiful they were, and they're still beautiful now, even more so now perhaps that the little farms are being bought up by English retirees who try to fix them up, chop-chop, and get bitchy when the plumber doesn't turn up on time or the plasterer gives a price to plaster the wall and then comes back to explain that the wall absorbs humidity, there's no point in plastering it at all, but if they insist on plastering it's going to have to cost twice as much as originally planned. The world is full of people who give orders, and it's full of people who don't know what they're talking about - what are you gonna do?

- Paul Werner