everything in the sky

Last Friday I took an 8 hour train from Florence to Paris.
The journey only really started in Milan. I’d been lucky enough to get a small compartment to myself and was hoping I’d get to just watch the scenery alone when a young Russian girl, no more than 16 and wearing what appeared to be solely a napkin, dragged her mother onboard.
“You speak English? Da? Going to Paris?”
“Da. Si,” I said. “Uh, yes.”
“Good. You look at my mother until Paris, okay? She not speak English.”
I was almost certain she meant “after” but I took a look at her mother anyway: an ageing, bemused woman wearing the kind of low-cut leopardskin dress that would just look trashy on a younger woman but, with her obvious excitement at being on a train, somehow gave her a slight carnival atmosphere. Her boobs moved oddly and seemingly with their own momentum, threatening to spill out like overripe fruit.
“Uh, okay.”
“Look at her until Paris.”
“Da, okay,” I said, mentally promising to keep to the spirit of the agreement but not the letter.
She did make compelling viewing though. As the train embarked, she made noises like a spaceship, mimicking one with her hand.
“Pagliari!” she said. “Yuri Gargarin? Cosmonaut!”
“Da,” I said. “Take-off.”
She grinned, happy, before spotting my guitar. “Ah! Classic? Folk?”
“Uh, rock, blues…” I said. She laughed, delighted, before launching into a full 3 minute rendition of “Summer In The City.” I smiled weakly. My embarrassment complete, she then proceeded to interrogate people as they joined us in the cabin.
They were an interesting bunch too. One spent the entire journey engaged in some industrial-strength crotch adjustment, all the while concentrating fiercely on the phone he was furiously SMSing on. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was locked in some kind of crotch-chess match, such was his concentration - that he was broadcasting each complex, strategic move to his opponent, who was then adjusting his own crotch and responding.
I never got to see ‘check-mate.’  
Another man, balding and wearing sunglasses he never removed, seemed to have somehow undone another button on his mustard yellow shirt each time I stole a glance in his direction. I get the feeling he spent the entire journey watching the Russian boobs moving in their leopard-skin cage.
I escaped to the buffet car just as our little carriage became full. I drank a coffee there and stood and watched the mountains move by. A scraggily-looking traveller was doing the same, his patchy goatee and faded denim jacket giving him the look of someone who’d been on the road for years. I considered starting up a conversation but decided we were both enjoying the silence too much to ruin it.
The train slowed abruptly and the traveller quickly downed the rest of his coffee before pulling a shiny gold badge out of his pocket and pinning it to his coat. He was a undercover police officer!
He began moving rapidly toward the front of the train and I quickly finished my coffee and followed him, all the while muttering a theme song I’d made up for him in my head (“Un. Der. Cov. Er. TRAINPOLICE!” was the gist of it.)
In the end he met up with two French border guards who climbed onboard the train and, in a slightly disappointing climax, they proceeded to very politely just check passports and make small-talk with passengers. No-one was even shot or anything.
Disappointed, I returned to my cabin to find the Russian mom had pulled out a small map and was asking everyone there to point out where they were from. It had sparked some conversations. Crotch-adjuster and button-undoer, seemingly both from the same area of Pakistan, were engaged in a heated cricket debate. A French mom was exchanging baby photos with Russian mom, and an Italian engineer was trying to work out where in South Africa I was from.
The temperature dropped as we entered France over the mountains, and Russian mom, a little cold, pulled out a thick, leopard-skin vest to wear over her leopard-skin dress. I wondered if it was the same leopard.
Button-undoer looked a little disappointed, before returning to his conversation about cricket.

I’m staying in a friend’s spare room in an artist’s residence, right under the word ‘Paris’ on Google Maps. The residence, a large group of buildings over 600 years old, houses just over 300 artists, all of whom are either studying or working on projects approved by an arts council set up by the government. They do so in return for cheap rent and minor funding.
The buildings are quieter are than you’d expect buildings full of the dangerously creative to be. Sometimes as you walk around you can hear the piano being played quietly in the distance, and a few times while walking up the 6 flights of uneven steps to my little room I’ve heard the faint sounds of a harmonium from a nearby flat.
I’ve been introduced to a few of the other residents but otherwise I rarely see them as I walk around - a figure in paint-spattered jeans smoking on their balcony; someone painting, glimpsed covertly through a large, open studio door; a broad, shirtless, dreadlocked guy who stepped out of a dark corridor holding 3 large trash bags who whispered a soft “Bonjour” before meandering in the direction of the laundry. They seem to lead quiet lives in their own flats.
The residence’s laundry room is small but neat, though the washing machines tend to eat the washing tokens. There are a few books that have been left on a shelf nearby, presumably for the artists to browse while their dirty overalls chug slowly in circles. Between ‘The Science of Yoga’ and the ‘100 Vegetarian Recipes’ sits a copy of Stephen King’s ‘The Rage’.
I go for runs along the Seine on most days. The tourists are a nuisance, taking every opportunity to step out into the path for photographs or to stop suddenly to look at the terrible art being sold along the roadside (I will be burning the next poster of ‘Chat Noir’ I see). According to Wikipedia, Paris has the most tourists per year of any city in the world.
These last few days seem to be the first of a long summer. The sun throws sparkles off the river and casts sinuous light beams along the undersides of bridges along the route. Homeless men, their tents set up in odd nooks under bridges and in sewer tunnels only visible through barred holes along the river’s banks, sit on the side of the river, fishing and cooking bacon and drinking. They seem happy enough, from what I can tell, and make no serious effort to beg.
There are a lot of house-boats along the river. (Who seriously names their houseboat ‘The Don Juan’?) Some have bikes or dogs onboard, or even whole luxury cars if they’re big enough. I like the ones with one or two lone pot-plants on top the most.
The Eiffel Tower has a large rotating light right on the very top of it, the beam circling the night-sky every few minutes just like a lighthouse. I didn’t know about it until, out one night just walking, I saw it slowly swing across the clouds overhead. It is probably my favourite thing about Paris.

Baguette in hand and on my way home, I decided to cut down a small alley in the hopes that it was a shortcut. It was sunny, and I was looking forward to a lunch of a fresh baguette, some chorizo, and some of Paris’s finest cheeses.
I was thinking the happy thoughts of a man in possession of fresh baked goods.
We spotted each other at the same time - he at the opposite end of the alley, the bright sunlight casting his long shadow forward.
He, too, had a baguette.
We both knew what was to be done. It was unstoppable, like the pull of moon or that X-man, Juggernaut.
Baguette duel.
The fight was short but brutal. He was of a newer school, Brutal Unleavened Rye, while I favoured a more traditional style, Mauling Angry Wholewheat. He was young but inexperienced. I was, only briefly, sorry that I would have to kill him.
20 bloody minutes later I staggered to the alley’s exit, victorious but cut deep.
Cut too damn deep.
I collapsed in front of an pair of American tourists.
“My god, are you alright?” the wife said, kneeling.
“Someone call 911!” the husband shouted.
I feebly gestured them closer. My blood pooled slowly on the cobblestones.
“Don’t worry, son, there’s a doctor on the way,” the wife assured me. 
“C….ca…” I whispered, my trembling hand clutching my blood-spattered bread-weapon.
“What? What do you need, son? Anything.”
“Do you… have any camembert?” I whispered.

Question: How many beautiful French women, hair curling down in tresses, sunglasses in one hand, smoking like it was still good for them, all the while wearing flower-print dresses and basking in the early Spring sunshine like the Universe existed solely to provide them with beautiful alleys down which to walk while laughing, does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 
Answer: Marry me.