Roissypensées

When you travel in France you come into frequent and heavily armed contact with the various branches of French law enforcement. The train from Bellovacum to Paris usually carries a complement of either railway police, or gendarmes, six or seven bulky, crew-cut men, who thunder through the train in a tight peloton once or twice, and look threatening when we stop at Méru, where two conductors were seriously assaulted in the fall (the perpetrator, who has been caught and jailed, told police that he was just “getting back at the SNCF”). In the Gare du Nord, I buy my ticket for the RER, the suburban train that will take me to the airport, under the watchful gaze of two camouflaged soldiers with berets and submachine guns. Moving from the great industrial-age train shed to the concrete utopia of Aéroport Charles de Gaulle, the policing becomes subtler, but no less awesome. The border guards may seem barely able to muster the effort – or too busy doing calisthenics – to focus their gaze onto your passport, but through the power of one mistranslated adverb, a routine security notice – bagages laissés sans surveillance seront immédiatement détruits- becomes a promise of superhuman retribution: “Unattended baggage will be instantly destroyed by the police.”

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At De Gaulle, service jobs seem to be divided into ethnic fiefs (this happens elsewhere – at O’Hare, the entire maintenance staff seems to hale from Eastern Europe). At check-in, most of the Continental staff are African, as are the security screeners. The border police, unsurprisingly, are all white. Strangest of all – since this is not one of the principal immigrant populations of France – the men who check passports and boarding cards before allowing you onto the squishy escalator tubes that connect the different levels of Terminal 1 are, without exception, Indian, as are the women who run the supplementary gate side security clearance.

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Since most US-bound flights depart from Terminal 1, the donut-shaped building is always full of Americans, who – whether because they’re still groggy from their early starts or because they feel that being only two hours away from the Anglophone haven of their Continental Airlines 757 gives them license to be cranky – are mostly complaining. The worst are the well-off couples in late middle age or early retirement, the women with their too-crisp makeup, the men wearing small fedoras and light-coloured slacks. They present as worldly, experienced travellers, well-dressed (although depending on their politics, this may mean North Face and Lululemon, rather than jacket and tie), with their smooth-rolling Nautica suitcases and frequent flyer club luggage tags. Two weeks along the Loire valley have, however, reduced them to helplessness, and husbands splutter in anger to wives about how the cashier at the newsstand not only spoke to them in French, but also had the effrontery to expect them to be able to pay for their copy of Time in Euro coins. “France is a wonderful country” says one woman, while waiting for the CDGVAL, the automated inter-terminal shuttle which runs along a straight line with five stops, and on which all signage and announcements are bilingual, “except that there’s no one to help you and it’s impossible to figure out where you’re going.” Her consort quickly agrees: “it wasn’t this bad five years ago.”

Other subspecies of homo americanus are also in evidence. As I wait in line at the check-in counter, at immigration control, at security, and at the mandatory secondary manual security screening – for I am flying from Europe to the United States – I find myself keeping pace with a group of latter-day high school Daisy Millers, on some mass-market Grand Tour. Their overweight and overfriendly chaperone sports a long-sleeved “Run for the Cure” t-shirt and a back pack declaring her allegiance to “EuroAmerican Tours: The Best in Educational Travel.” The girls are silent and dead-eyed through check-in, immigration control, and security. Only when we reach the gate do they show any signs of life. One girl begins excitedly comparing Roissy and the airport in Gainesville, Florida. One of her friends listens without much enthusiasm, but another – whose spectacular hickeys rebuke the chaperone and can only derive from a night of passion with a dissolute Romanian aristocrat – calmly ignores her, puts on her iPod headphones instead, and begins to dance in slow-motion. The fourth girl joins her, although since she doesn’t have an iPod, she’s slow-motion dancing to complete silence.

And the cruel irony of it all – and perhaps the reason why I’m sitting at the gate, writing nasty things about my fellow man – is that, for today at least, I’m one of them. Like the proto-Byronic hero of Gothic novel struggling beneath a family curse, I wield an American passport through Right of Blood. When I hand the gaudy booklet to the man who controls access to the hallway in which you line up for immigration control, he points to the flyleaf image of the defence of Fort McHenry, and asks me, in French, who the most prominent figure is. I tell him that I don’t know, and that I’m not really American (though I have to be careful here that I don’t present myself as a forger of passports). He’s shocked – “you should still know” he tells me, “it’s Christopher Columbus!”