On a trip to France, when I was 14, I remember the sink of estrangement when, in an extended gathering of my host-family, I was meant to greet each of the members of the party––a group of some forty or so. Now as we know, personal greetings in France take the form of a two-time brushing of cheeks––three and sometimes four with regional variation––or in case the parties are men, a sober shaking of hands. So strange to me, and so embarrassing, was this clamour of kissing that I found myself refusing when it came time to leave. I would not make the rounds again, I waited outside.

At that time I learnt that personal greetings in France extend to class-mates and peer-groups (I am supposing henceforth from an eligible age). What happens when class-mates, as is frequent at a certain age, find themselves in the midst of a feud? Is feuding cause for exemption? Or are French habits of greeting so inexorable that cheeks must be brushed lest the heavens fall?

Greetings in Paris follow an inexorable plan, albeit with contextual variation. In small shops, for example, there is always the same pattern, though it is uttered with seeming sincerity to each on every occasion. Sincerity is sounded at once in the tenor of ‘Madame’ or ‘Monsieur,’ a different intonation for everyone standing in line––seeming acknowledgement of our particularity. While that may be the rationale, shopkeepers sustain themselves in greetings all day by setting these to a kind of song, and that you are this Madame and not that is a function of where you fall in a phrase (and of course there are repetitions).

At the train station, on a first foray into town, there are elderly women around corners with flowers for people to buy. The flowers are terse and papery yet they wilt in the sun; the women stand alone, or occasionally, in twos. Have the women come from the same fields? The flowers suggest as much. Why station themselves apart then? Are they strangers with but fields in common? Is community unfavourable to commerce?

I see like-women later on the banks of the river dividing Buda from Pest. Now they bear textiles spun to a foregone pattern, and lace. They hold them up to show us as we pass, their fingers through the holes of the spin.

The faces in Budapest are hard to please, smiles are not forthcoming. Hospitality, in what becomes a favourite brasserie, where tea is served with a pot of honey and a silver tray, is as starched as the aprons. Who are you, stranger to me, English speaker, to ingratiate?

The plane taking off, spoke French, on arrival, it speaks Hungarian. A first impression on landing in Budapest, then, is the strangeness of the sounds from no mouth in particular. I can’t tell where the words stop, or where they begin. There is nothing Latinate with which to gauge English approximates. Indeed, the only word I manage to master in two weeks is szia, and then only because it sounds like an Australian see ya (though it is offered as a greeting on arrival and departure).

Home is: a dormitory in the Soviet style; two bunk beds at cross purposes, two desks in parallel. We are a bus ride and four train stops away from town centre, we are up the highway and nearly in the woods. The highway, one of Pest’s main arteries, is a single-lane in both directions. The sky above it is wide. At the window there is a gathering of insect life, rare visitations.

The foyer is: awash with name-tags affixed below faces, and folders, red or blue, clutched at the breast. The faces are in various stages of passage from trepidation to the putting of best feet forward. I am an anxious child again, the first day of school. We are shown to the dining room, the computer room, the laundry room, the lounge— amenities for two weeks: a conference in Budapest.

I pass some workmen in overalls on my street at lunch time. The one has three baguettes under one arm, a bottle of wine under the other, and in a bag he carries at least two kinds of cheese and a bottle of peppers. Formidable!

Later, I pass birds on the street with crooked, shrivelled feet.

The soul of old objects inhabits new parks. We visit the Parc de Bercy—past Le Jardin J. Joyce, and over Le Pont S. de Beauvoir. Everyone is taking their leisure in the sun, and why not? We pass by the woods with black and green bark and people in shadows; we pass the formal hedges with benches all around. Then, the pure-visual sensation of purple and pink: the pink is stout along the ground, the purple is aspirant, rising higher. They are planted in what looks like free form, but deceptively. Really the beds are shaped to a generous curve like the back of a Christian fish (which meets its underside over the way). What do we need paintings for when we have gardens? I suppose so we may pay our respects to colour and light. So we may study, multiply, the good of sensation!

We give to things a soul which we cultivate in their absence and expect to recover when once more in their presence. I am tracing my steps of last year. I go looking for the same tea-cups and tea, the same candles and soap. I visit the Boulangerie with dark chocolate tarts. I find the place on the Rue Daguerre with black circles of fromage de chèvre. I am trying to gird up the spirit of Paris. I can’t seem to find it.

Besides, there are signs of neighbourly discord with the birds. On one floor, a woman feeds them at her window—they go right inside; when she is not home, they come flapping at the glass. On the floor above, where the wire is, the birds are most unwelcome. The woman living there—she could be a man, or a man and a woman— is invisible; I see only the wire. Have he and she put it there? Or was it there already on moving in, arranged by the building, since: (i) the birds are a nuisance, and (ii) the birds like the eaves best, and (iii) this is where the eaves are?

We return to Paris, to the same flat as last year. There is a distinct pleasure of familiar surrounds: the court yard in click-clack yellow, blue and black; the elevator for a maximum of two persons, doors folding inwards (French engineering) which no amount of skill can close quietly or well. Inside, the window-shutters open with a squawk of metal. The birds of last year are roosting again with the neighbours. Only, I don’t remember the wire barbing upwards from the window-sill and downwards from the eaves. Inside, the place is as we left it. Only, there is one photograph more on the bookshelf—a family portrait—and a reading-light less. How to share the remaining one?

While it announces its location (the Biennale gardens) in its title, Steve McQueen’s 40 minute film work, ‘Giardini,’ is disconcertingly filmed in Winter to none of the sun and honey-bush, and to none of the crowds, of the Summer gardens which greet us now. McQueen has banked on our disquiet, and it works. There are images (here), which recur, of doberman dogs trawling the scent of something on the ground, like blood hounds. They could be wild but for their sleek coats and refined bodies. We could be in London, dreary with rain, urban refuse and old columns. The desolation is sinister and McQueen pairs it with the roaring sound of crowds, as of a football match. But the only sign of people here, apart from two liminal figures whose seeming confrontation resolves into an embrace, is the luxury cruise ship that parades past once on the lagoon, as they do daily by the dozen.

But there is also hush as we cut to film versions of ‘still life,’ sometimes paired as diptychs on a split screen: multi-coloured confetti in wet pebbles, a wood-spider on moss, a red insect on a yellow flower. So is borne out McQueen’s stated interest in really looking, and there is an object lesson in what we are here to do in the name of art.

Venice begins to change its aspect when described, by a dinner companion, as a Thirteenth Century Disney Land.