At Home in France (19 page)

After a few brutally cold days, I left the winter climate behind, circling back through the town of Aurillac. In the old quarter, now a pedestrian shopping center, there’s a
wonderful old-world cheese shop, the Crémière Leroux, which glistens with white tiles and marble. Enormous wheels of Cantal sit on the counter, with a choice of either aged or sweet, the younger type. Raymond had told me he prefers the sweet, so I bought some of this for him and the aged variety for me.

I came back to late fall in the Lot. Mornings in the valley were laden with fog; from my perch in the house, it lay like a cloudy carpet at my feet. If I drove into St-Céré for my coffee, I had to turn on the headlights—but by noon the sun would break through so that the earth warmed and the trees glistened from the dew.

I wanted to sever the Charron connection immediately and stopped by the garage as soon as I was back to explain politely that I’d worked out a more sensible arrangement with a neighbor. He gave me his rehearsed smile, and that was that. In Biars, I had the mud-caked car washed. I bought a Dustbuster and cleaned the interior. I bought a car cover for the wintering-over. Charleston sparkled! She was ready for hibernation.

For the trip back to Paris, I planned to catch the nine-fourteen morning train in St-Denis. Raymond advised me to get to the house by eight-thirty. It was a damp, chilly morning with a steady drizzle—to my consternation, since I’d just given Charleston a last polishing the evening before. When I arrived at the Hirondes, Raymond was stationed at the barn, which is just beside the house. With a deadly seriousness, like a
gendarme
directing traffic at the Place de la Concorde, he guided me inch by inch into the barn. He had laid down heavy sheets of cardboard to the right and rear of the barn, where Charleston would sit. I finally positioned the car to his satisfaction and deboarded with my single bag. He cursed the rain and explained
that he wouldn’t cover the car until she was thoroughly dry. He also reassured me that she would be absolutely safe. If he and Simone went away, the garage would be locked. And when they were home, he would park his car behind her so that a thief would have to steal his car first!

We went to the house for a coffee. Simone wanted to show me something
extraordinaire
. She led me into the kitchen. There on the counter was an oversized
cèpe
with another, smaller one growing from the cap, piggyback-style. A woman friend, she said, had found it yesterday in the woods and Simone had said that she must show it to Madame Barry. This was no small thing to me: so, I held a place in her world beyond this room, this moment.

Simone was dressed as if for Sunday, in a green wool dress with a string of white beads. She and a friend had appointments at the hairdresser’s and would be going with us as far as Bétaille. When we left the house, her woman friend was waiting by the car. Simone and her friend insisted on sitting in the back. We piled in. On the way, my journey back to the States was discussed in detail: the hours by train, by plane, in both directions. Simone’s friend was astonished at the length of the air flight. Raymond, who collects and enjoys statistics of any kind, explained to her that the tailwinds made the trip from the States much shorter than the return.

We dropped the women off by the bakery; they each unfolded a little plastic rain cap over their head, despite the fact that they were minutes from the hairdresser. On we went.

We were at the station shortly after nine. The station is the hub of St-Denis—if that’s the word for a dull and generally lifeless outpost. (The town’s very name, St-Denis-
Près-Martel, connotes its decidedly kid-sister status.) I told Raymond that he needn’t wait with me for the train, but he insisted. He likes to watch the trains, he said. As we stood on the platform he explained, with an obvious pride, that his son worked for the SNCF, the French railroad. According to French law, this allowed Raymond, as his father (though not Simone, who was not his birth mother) free, unlimited travel, so oftentimes he took short excursions by himself on the weekends. His son’s children, he added, could ride at half price until age eighteen.

The shrill whistle of the little train was heard in the distance. I thanked Raymond for the favor of taking the car and driving me to the station. As I shook his hand I slipped a hundred-franc bill into his palm. He waved it back at me, but I planted my hands behind my back. I’m confident I read him correctly: he was grateful.

I love a train. Traveling by rail gives you a sense of real time, a spirit of adventure, drama, and the possibility of romance (although the rhythmic clack of wheels on track, the cradle sway, usually puts me to sleep). The train pulling into the St-Denis station was nearly stagecoach size. Passengers gazed from the windows of its two cars, some in boredom, some in mild curiosity. It came to a trembling stop. Raymond gave me a hand up as I mounted the high step. I sat down at the station-side window. He was still standing on the platform and gave me a gentle wave. I waved back.
“Au revoir,”
I mouthed. There was a sudden ache in my chest. Raymond’s figure blurred into an image of my father, who, when I’d last seen him conscious, was standing on a train platform waving farewell as I departed for Europe. The train started up with a small jolt. I glanced back. Raymond was watching the train move out, his arm raised, seemingly forgotten, in midair.

I
n the spring of 1993, when my office closed for a week, I tagged on my two-week vacation. With the luxury of three weeks, I could make a long pilgrimage, albeit solely for pleasure, with Charleston. I decided on Provence, the region most people dream of when they think of the French countryside. I hadn’t been back since Jean and I were there years before. Then we had had the fortune of staying in the summerhouse owned by a Parisian couple who were Jean’s friends, which was located on a hilltop in Cagna-sur-Mer outside Nice. This trip I aimed to explore the less glittery side of the region, going the
logis
route.

France is the land of pilgrimages, and I have always been fascinated by their history. Before I left for France, I resurrected my
Canterbury Tales
.

When I read that last line, I was confused: I thought a pilgrimage was supposed to be a penitential exercise or an attempt to seek a cure for oneself or a relative. Or, on the lowest scale, a sentence for committing a civil offense, something like our system of community service in lieu of incarceration—and who would be longing to share the road with robbers, rapists, and murderers?

I talked over the subject with Charles, who shed more light on the matter. In the eleventh century, he said, the practice of going on pilgrimages satisfied a deep need among adventurous, perhaps marginally literate, and pious folk. Christians venerated relics and believed that cures of body and soul could be achieved by arduous journeys to shrines where the remains of holy persons were kept. The growing number of monasteries fostered this trend, providing way stations where pilgrims could eat and sleep (and spend money). Competition between monasteries to attract pilgrims grew intense. Some pilgrimages, like that to St. James of Campostela in Northwestern Spain, became immensely popular and safer alternatives to the risky voyage to the Holy Land. The popular conception of pilgrimages is that they were undertaken in order to atone for some grave sin. Actually,
although some of the harsher or more spectacular pilgrimages might have been performed as penance, the great majority seem to have been a mixture of personal devotion, fulfilling adventure, wanderlust, or mercantile opportunity. Sharing experiences, risks, and hardships must have built that same sense of solidarity, mutual confidence, fellow feeling, and occasional hilarity that twentieth-century man feels during a long bus ride or after a scary airplane landing.

Most people who lived between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries never went more than a day’s walk away from their birthplace. To be a pilgrim one had to be able to leave behind occupation, home, and loved ones (pilgrims rarely traveled with their families). Peasants, farmers, serfs, and slaves, who weren’t free to leave, were unlikely to go on pilgrimage. More pilgrims came from among the single folk (young widows and widowers were much more common then), and from among town or city dwellers. They had heard travelers’ tales, and were itching to go themselves. Most pilgrims only went once in their lives, but eighteen months is a big chunk out of a life expectancy of thirty-five years. Wealthier pilgrims traveled in comfort; these could afford better food, horses or mules, and servants. Many others started and returned nearly penniless, depending on charity throughout their trip.

Pilgrimages took many months and often years. You traveled light, with a bedroll, a staff, and a cloak. A scallop shell that pinned up the brim of your floppy felt hat told everyone you met that you were a pilgrim on the way to Campostela. Even today, the French call scallops the shells of St. James
(coquilles St-Jacques)
. Pilgrims traveled singly or in bands of varying sizes. This de
pended on how safe they felt the countryside was, whether they could keep up with the party, and whether they felt comfortable with each other. All across Southwestern France there are braided routes that the pilgrims followed from minor shrine to major site, all ending in a crossing of the Pyrenees into Spain.

My pilgrimage to Provence was undertaken in unabashed wanderlust. I had only one slight upset with Charleston. It was in Avignon, which I found difficult to negotiate by car. I circled and circled and found nowhere to park on the street. At a sign for the Palais des Papes—the principal focus of my visit—I turned and found myself irrevocably committed to a dark underground garage. I resist underground garages at all costs. I fear I’ll lose track of the location of my car, that I’ll become trapped in a mechanized system I don’t comprehend. I am a person who balks at an automatic stamp machine—even one with instructions in English. But there was no retreat. I parked on a level where there was plenty of space and took my ticket from the automatic dispenser. C
AISSE 3
, the sign read. I emblazoned it on my mind. I rode the
ascenseur
with a British couple, who seemed equally at sea—“Darling, you will remember which ramp?” We were belched out of the elevator into a prisonlike concrete passageway that eventually led to a street behind the
palais
.

In the center of its courtyard was a gargantuan Botero sculpture of a nude astride a bull, a hilarious affront to its venue. The entire building had been turned over to an extensive Botero exhibition—to the horror of a tour group of proper British ladies in summer frocks and flowery straw hats, who found it “shocking” and “disgusting.” I wandered through the great halls until lunchtime, de
lighted that I’d stumbled on the irreligious Botero show. Then I took my carefully memorized circuitous route back to the
ascenseur
, congratulating myself when I found Caisse 3 and Charleston without difficulty. At the end of the spiraling ramp, I handed my ticket through the window to the man in the booth.

“Vous n’avez pas payé?”
he demanded, in a disapproving manner.

But where was I to have paid?

“Non,”
I replied, the claustrophobic heat of the garage mounting.

“Descendez,”
he said in a tone used for children. This was a man who would exercise his authority to the hilt. He motioned to a machine on the opposite side of a concrete embankment.

Two cars were now backed up behind me. I jumped from the car and followed him. He inserted my ticket into a slot in the machine and pointed to the fee registered. I fumbled through the change in my wallet and came up with an inexact amount. In aggravating slow motion, he took the coins from my sweating palm and dropped them in. The change rattled into the cup. I scooped it up and raced back to the car. There was not a honk from the patient line of cars, probably tourists like myself, dreading a similar humiliation. I drove out of the garage into the welcome light of day, my distrust in garage parking confirmed.

Few places—the restaurant, the inn—remain fixed in my memory as time passes: I have to go to diaries to summon them up again. Les Hospitaliers, in Le Poët-Laval, which I’d read about in Pat Wells’s
Food Lover’s Guide to France
and which was a splurge, is one that will remain ineradicable. It encapsulates that Provence trip. The ho
tel’s architecture merged with the crumbling white stonework that was the last vestige of this remote medieval mountain hamlet. The village was a Pompeii, with the hotel a phoenix rising from its ruin. This was the first place I’d ever visited in France where I literally could not go for a run—the road down was a sheer drop to the valley. There was a pool, sprinkled with flower petals from the surrounding trees, which I had to myself for a swim before dinner. My room overlooked the terrace, where a fir tree right out of a Van Gogh painting stood like a tall spear against the sky and morning glories spilled over hedges.