At Home in France (22 page)

A glass of wine and a fire invited philosophizing. We talked of our lives, of how we felt at this point. Like me, Patsy has never been married. She has a problematic history with men: when they draw closer to commitment, she backs off; when they back off, she grows madly attached. Now, Patsy said, romantic fantasies have receded. She isn’t sure if her sexual impulses have faded because of menopause or—she chuckled—simply been replaced by her infatuation with her cat, Ferguson, who is the love of her life.

Being in our fifties, we agreed, is somewhat bewildering. I showed her a poem, titled “The Child,” by W. S. Merwin (who lives and works in Southwest France):

“It’s like having a new suit of clothes that doesn’t quite fit, isn’t it?” I asked her. People
die
in their fifties. As Merwin says, you feel the blood crawling over the plain: death is conceivable; not frightening, but
possible
.

And will we ever make love again? Patsy shrugged, with a scrunched expression, as if it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. For myself, I doubt it. You have to seek a passionate relationship, which is not something I do—in fact, I’ve never felt the sexual drive that a number
of my women friends have—and I don’t deceive myself in thinking that men would find me sexy. If anything, it’s not passion I miss, but being physically touched. I do miss being felt, held, made to feel alive in that way. Patsy understood. The concern is not about making love, but keeping love going with others.

For the last day of her visit, I asked Patsy if she wanted to take a day’s excursion or just relax at the house. She preferred the latter. I pulled up the floor heater between the chairs and we curled up with books for the morning. Around noon, we drove to Collonges-la-Rouge for lunch. The small red-sandstone manor houses built by leaders of the viscountcy of Turenne for their holidays make this town unique. We walked along the blush-red roads, admiring the blush-red houses. It’s as if the town glows from an inner fire. At a small, rustic restaurant, we shared a bottle of wine over omelettes and crusty country bread. It was the end of this journey with Patsy, but the first, I proposed, as we raised our glasses, of other pilgrimages together in France.

A
daily constitutional is a vital part of my life at the house. I drive to the valley, where the terrain is flat, for a comfortable run. I have mapped out two different routes. One is an eight-kilometer run, flat from start to finish, from the bridge over the Dordogne to the village of Puybrun, where Monsieur Jean Mas, the all-important
notaire
, lives. I walk one way and run back. The road goes past farmhouses and enviable country homes, cornfields, vegetable gardens, cows and goats grazing in meadows. The other, with gentle slopes, follows the Dordogne in the direction of St-Céré. The river is to one side, forest to the other. It’s the more solitary route of the two. I can make of it what I will: a 10k, 12k, or whatever.

In the summer of 1986, during a run in Prospect Park one Sunday morning—when the park is closed to traffic—I was struck from behind by a bicyclist zooming along at top speed. I flew into the air and, when I landed,
saw that my lower left arm was bent at a very peculiar angle. At the emergency room in a nearby hospital, I found out I’d broken both arms, the left acutely. Even worse, the seriously broken arm was improperly set, so it subsequently had to be rebroken and operated on (for nearly four hours) at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. Yes, suffering has its positive side—or so Mother and church had always affirmed. I always got a seat on the subway. I discovered the generosity of friends and grew to accept dependency.

When I started to run in France, however, the following fall, I was in a different frame of mind. What if I was struck by an automobile? What if I was knocked unconscious? Who would know who I was, where I was from? I couldn’t shake these troubling thoughts. It occurred to me that it would be wise to carry some sort of identification. Once, during a visit to a monastery in another region, I’d picked up—in an outburst of nostalgia—one of those little Catholic “dog tags,” in green felt, which read
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY CALL A PRIEST
. I rescued it from the back of the drawer of the bureau, where it had lain forgotten. I crossed out the words
a priest
and substituted
Marius Bézamat
and his phone number. I carried it in the pocket of my running pants, and it made all the difference. The vision of myself as a nameless corpse vanished.

When I returned the following spring, Monsieur Bézamat invited me inside the house—he had something to return to me. There on the table was the little dog tag! Evidently, it had fallen out of my pocket on the road. Monsieur Bézamat explained that the people at the Fénelon in Carennac had phoned him, after someone had brought it to them, and he’d stopped by to fetch it. Monsieur Bézamat, my unsuspecting guardian, looked a little
sheepish. I pocketed the tag with some embarrassment. The miracle of its return was reassuring, but it also gave me the creeps. It was as if that little tag possessed some Catholic voodoo that still had a hold on me.

Each day on my walk/run I see something different: the particular cast of light or configuration of clouds, the sight of a pheasant in flight, the cycle of crops: tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, corn. On this particular morning—it was a warm October in 1993—I began my walk late in the afternoon, on the day before I was to leave for Paris. At a brisk pace, I passed a country house where an elderly gentleman, a baggy figure in bib overalls, was tending his flower garden. Just past the house I approached a field—“corn as high as an elephant’s eye,” I sang to myself—when an enormous German shepherd-like dog, with long spindly legs, bounded from the tall stalks—a blur of fur and bared teeth, sailing through the air in a snarling charge. He hurled himself at my feet and sank his teeth into my left calf, as if it were a pork chop. It happened in a flash, but I had the split-second sinking—and surprisingly clearheaded—realization that I’d be out of commission for any walking or running for a while. Then, shock. I screamed crazily over and over—
aieee, aieee, aieee!
The dog slunk back and crouched, eyeing me threateningly. My leg was spurting blood, drenching my sock, flowing into my running shoe. I stood tottering, stunned, and, remembering the gardener, started screaming, “Monsieur! Monsieur!”

Eventually, he heard my shouts. He propped his hoe against a tree and made his way in my direction, with the side-rocking, struggling gait of an elderly, overweight gentleman.

“Le chien, il est à vous?”
I bellowed at him. He shook his head—he didn’t own the dog—stamping his foot and
waving his arms to shoo the beast away. Then he came to my side.

Robust as he was, he only reached my chin. I flung my arm around his shoulders for support—feeling monstrously tall—and he clasped an arm around my waist. We staggered like two drunks back to his garden, where he deposited me in a tiny wrought-iron chair. My screams had subsided into moans. Visibly shaken, he wrung his hands helplessly. I started wailing again—
“aieee, un médecin!”
—to put fire under him. I felt like a wild raging creature, unable to regain a sense of reason or presence of mind.

He hurried into the house and quickly returned with some gauze, Band-Aids, a strip of cloth. This was futile. I took a sideways glance at my leg and winced at the alarming brilliant-colored flow of blood still pouring from the punctures.

Then, somehow, magically, at this moment when the world seemed to have spun to a halt, a woman appeared. She was small, with coal-black hair and a dark complexion, and she was wearing bedroom slippers. Where had she come from? She was a figure of amazing calm, despite my renewed cries now that I had a second party to whom I could wail.

She and Monsieur had a hurried exchange about what had happened. I detected her French as nonnative. Italian, perhaps, I thought distractedly. Bending down, she told me, in a tone that commanded me to hush, that she would go back for her car and take me to the doctor. She shuffled off, her heelless slippers flapping on the walk. With this, my cries died. I felt drained, oddly bestilled, exhausted. I asked Monsieur—my mind picking at a stray detail—if the woman was Italian.

“Non, Portuguese,”
he said.
“Mais une bonne voisine
.”
But a good neighbor—there it was again—as if to reassure me that her foreignness did not detract from her reliability.

In a few minutes she was back with a dilapidated small black car. I eased into the front seat, lifting my bad leg with both hands clasped behind the knee. The floor of the car was a clutter of papers, tools, and rags. A thumb-size plastic Virgin was stuck to the dashboard, rosary beads were draped around the rearview mirror, and a pair of broken sunglasses sat in the open ashtray. As we drove off I asked her where she was taking me. To the doctor in Bétaille. Not the emergency room at St-Céré? I pressed her. No, the Bétaille doctor would be best. Was she sure he was there? (This was a Monday.) Yes, he was there. She must have checked. During this limited conversation, I was intrigued by her accent. It suddenly, unaccountably, occurred to me that that’s how foreign I sounded speaking French, when I couldn’t hear the distortion myself.

She drove into the parking lot across from the bakery and stopped the car. I followed her—she made no attempt to assist me—with mincing limps, to an office at the rear of a building, which also housed a butcher and a small grocery. She rang the bell and the door was instantly opened by the young doctor, outfitted in a crisp white coat and with an expectant expression on his face. Once again, this new candidate for my woes set me off:
“un chien méchant”
I sobbed. He nodded patiently and guided me, with the sort of upright, confidence-building stance typical of doctors, to the examining table. We established that I was American. (The locals can’t distinguish, of course, between an American or English accent, and since many British have settled in this area, they are
usually surprised at my nationality.)
“Américaine!”
he whispered, as if it were a sacred word. I was probably his first American patient.

“C’est pas très grave,”
he said reassuringly, and told me to lie back so that he could clean and dress the wound. He asked if I had had a tetanus shot. Yes? Then he would give me a painkiller and an antibiotic, and I should see a doctor as soon as I reached Paris, and then my doctor in New York. The Portuguese woman stood patiently to the side, her crossed arms enclosing her cloth sack purse.
“Regardez, madame,”
the doctor instructed her, as if she were a medical student, pointing out the position of the gashes on either side of my leg made by the eyeteeth and lower teeth, respectively—
“une piqûre classique!”
He beamed at me as if I’d earned a merit badge. When he finished, he patted my leg and I sat up, feeling intact again now that I was bandaged. Since I hadn’t brought any money with me, I promised to return and pay him before I left in the morning.

I hobbled stiffly to the car. It was painful to walk, since the dog’s eyeteeth had penetrated the muscle. On the drive back to my car, Madame told me in no uncertain terms that I should see the people who owned the dog; they were responsible for the doctor’s bill. I dismissed this with a wave of my hand—twenty dollars was the last thing I was concerned about. And anyway, what people? When we reached the car, I thanked her profusely. She had performed the kind service with the unquestioning dutifulness of a soldier. She nodded like a lieutenant dismissing the troops and pulled away.

I drove directly to the Hirondes. I needed to tell them the time of my departure the next morning, but if the truth be told, I was yearning for some sympathy.
Raymond was standing on the porch and looked aghast, just the reaction I wanted, when he saw my bandaged leg and gimpy walk.
“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”
he wanted to know. When I told him about the dog attack, his lower lip dropped and a blank curtain seemed to fall across his face. For the first time since I’d known him, he was utterly dumbfounded. He waved me inside with an encompassing gesture.
“Simone, Simone,”
he called helplessly.

But you must find the owners, she said instantly, stripping herself of her apron as she came from the kitchen. I smelled and heard the sizzle of roasting potatoes. Raymond wagged his head vigorously in agreement. I said that I wouldn’t be able to do that: it was difficult to drive, and where would I begin? Besides, I had to get ready to leave in the morning.

No, Simone insisted. She would go with me, or Raymond, or both of them. The owners must be found, because—the sticking point—they owed me money for the doctor bill! I said that the twenty dollars was not that important to me—I was still looking for a “poor you” and some coddling. But it
was
important, they insisted. Raymond said he would get the car and the two of us would go.