We are also the fruit of our travels, the history of our peregrinations: where we were born, where we grew up, where we learned or fell in love, where we found comfort or adventure. The sum of our habits and movements is the signature of our skeleton, which will bear witness to her like a ship's wake. It will say: this is how he or she stood, what he or she forced on the march of the world. He or she was a walker, a cyclist, a mountaineer, a pilot, a rainforest adventurer, or a sedentary nobody, the coroner might comment. And some will be surprised not to hear this coroner wonder: "Ah. Nice to meet you... But aren't you on your bike today?”
In a hundred- and nine-days’ time, the Olympic Games will be held in Paris, followed by the Paralympics. The bike fair is back on, and public transportations worry again, adding friction and anxiety to the horizon. I can't wait for a celebration of sport, of surpassing oneself, I expect nothing greater than the communion of a stadium and athletes, but who's ready for that, apart from the athletes?
I'm standing in front of the side of Notre-Dame’s Cathedral, at France’s kilometre zero, looking at the roof and the frame being repaired and thinking about my future trips. What will I find there, who will I find there, how will they get around? How will I present myself? Is my kilometre zero Notre-Dame de Paris? Or the place of my birth? Or where I grew up? Where I met someone, won a victory or achieved something material? What is the genealogy of the traveler and when did this journey begin?
I look at my old bike, battered despite the maintenance: the tyres damaged, the chain soiled by the rain and the floods we had to cross. Would my kilometre zero be a bicycle? A moment when, as a child, someone let go of my shoulder on the little path in the park with the big lawns, when I found my balance like taking flight? Back then, I had a red bike, vermilion red like the bike I'm looking at now, twenty years later. Without saying it, we sometimes reproduce our first loves, and so often we never leave them. We keep them tucked inside our hearts. It's funny how certain objects influence us, showing us the person we are, symbols of an ethos, or extended body language.
A year ago, I was doing a writing residency at a secondary school in Firminy, France – a place famous for the mark left by architect Le Corbusier. After a few days of discussions with teenagers from the Saint-Etienne area, they were asked to describe "the writer's ideal day" in a workshop they organised themselves. The writer they received was me, a bipedal mammal who had shared the words he liked in a book and whom they looked at about as curiously as through a zoo fence. One of the schoolgirls said: "It's morning. In Jean-Acier's ideal day, he has lots of red bikes and before leaving home, in a little house by the sea, as in the first chapter of Bicyclettres, he chooses blue clothes [...]".»
I didn't know this pupil, we'd exchanged what, five-six sentences? A child observes, with all its candour and questions. That day, the objects had preceded me. We went on to discuss on about my clothes, and sportswear, and then I recited from memory of a page from Aragon's Aurélien, with Riquet, a honest chap, a character depicted playing in a Paris swimming pool. He and Aurelien get out of the water, they put their clothes back on and watch each other dressed. From there, Riquet starts calling Aurelien "Sir" because of their difference in attire, Aurelien’s clothes being more bourgeois than his. The miracle of the uniform, of the swimming trunks in the pool, which abolishes the difference between two hydrodynamic bodies, comes to an end. It's the distinction, the divide, whereas they had found themselves friends at first sight.
It's March 2024 and I'm looking at the Seine: it won't be long before a Riquet will be able to bathe in this river again. The Olympic and Paralympic Games? Perhaps. Will it be possible in the next century? And the one after that? What will the Riquet of the future wear when he gets out of the water? A gas mask, disinfectant wipes, a suit to prevent flesh from cooking at 55°C and anti-radiation goggles? Or will he be dressed as lightly as possible, carefree, in love with the fabulous world he'll be living in, on his way to a pre-dinner drink with my children?
