The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [32]
A layer of French bureaucracy and bourgeois ambition has been unevenly applied across this tropical kaleidoscope. In tin-roofed villages, terrains de boules abut voodoo temples. The country’s only two roads, Routes Nationales 1 and 2, are fitted out with standard French signs, whose font, Frutiger 57 Condensed, is more accustomed to pointing the way to Nantes or Clermont-Ferrand but here twists itself around Amerindian place-names such as Iracoubo and Awala-Yalimapo. Restaurants (Café de la Gare, Bar Chez Pierrot) serve escalopes of wild jungle boar and Amazonian river fish with the scaly appearance of prehistoric coelacanths, cut into fillets and domesticated under a meunière sauce.
Deprivation and despair are everywhere apparent. The country has no economy to speak of. There is neither tourism, for the sea is plagued by sharks and brown from river sediment, nor, thanks to the poor quality of the soil, any agriculture. The roads down to Brazil are largely impassible and the territory’s sole reliable outlet to the world is the daily flight to Paris (a trip to nearby Venezuela or Peru requiring a connection in Orly).
3.
Proud of their achievements and generous of spirit, the WOWOW television executives had given permission for a small group of us to follow them on their journey.
A Hong Kong television station sent one of its most prominent young reporters accompanied – due to budgetary pressures – by only a one-person crew, who bore the contents of a studio on his back, leaving the elegant presenter (something of a household name in her city), to wander around in silver high-heeled shoes, her face frozen in a distressed expression, perhaps not unlike that worn by Amiral Estrées, the earliest French colonist of French Guiana, at the moment when he realised that the country was not to be the El Dorado which Sir Walter Ralegh had led him to expect from his conspicuously mistitled book, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, first published in London in 1595.
Ten rocket engineers from NASA had flown down from Florida as part of an exchange programme. Burdened by a sense of their own spatial superiority, they felt a pervasive need not to humiliate their hosts by any allusions to their agency’s achievements or the scale of its resources and so bore the unfailingly courteous and humble manner reminiscent of royalty on a tour of a slum district. They engaged in elaborate praise of their counterparts’ most routine achievements, like their ability to build a petrol station or to install air conditioning – though the patronisation seemed to whistle blithely past the French, who were in their hearts no less firmly, if a little less shyly, convinced of their own greatness.
We had all been billeted together in the Atlantis Hotel which, though only newly built, was fast surrendering itself to tropical mould and the incursions of jungle fauna. Vivid yellow lizards scuttled across the hotel’s floors and on returning to the room late at night, it was not uncommon to be confronted by a muscular and implausibly furry spider standing stationary on the wall above the television, a situation resolved by a Creole maintenance man who dispatched the monster with a decisive slap of rolled-up newspaper, leaving nothing but a brown sediment to commemorate the presence, then tossed the corpse off the balcony and, with apparent sincerity, bade one a pleasant end to the evening.
Kourou, the purpose-built town next to the space centre, was in no better shape than the hotel on its perimeter. Evoking comparison with Chandigarh and Brasilia, two other examples of modern architecture’s impressive track record of indifference to issues of context and culture, it was in an advanced stage of decomposition after only a few decades of existence. Unshaded wooden benches rotted unused by the man-made lake, having been designed to provide respite on the kind of afternoon stroll which it had not yet occurred to anyone in the tropics to take,