Inside a Pearl (32 page)

“Gone,” she said mournfully. “Closed.”

I saw Robbe-Grillet at the medieval nunnery that the Institute Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine (IMEC) was redoing as a study center outside Caen. I'd heard that IMEC, though an archive dedicated
to modern writers and editors, was building a greenhouse for Robbe-Grillet's precious collection of cacti. He told me that the plural in French should be
cactées
and explained the etymology. For the privilege of taking care of the
cactées
, IMEC received all of Robbe-Grillet's papers and the many, many films he shot.

Marie-Claude invited me to stay for two weeks in her summerhouse. It was a fisherman's cottage on the Île de Ré, in a small village that smelled of the brackish sea. Her house was at the end of a tiny street just wide enough for one car, a street called the ruelle des Musiciens. A high wall around her house was pierced by a green-painted wood gate, inside which was not only the cottage but also, somewhat unusually, a garden (another house had been torn down to make room for the garden). The cottage had a large eat-in kitchen, quite modern, with big windows and French doors letting on to the garden. The kitchen flowed into the sitting room, where there were twin couches and a rattan chair, its back swelling like a cobra's hood, drawn up beside the blackened fireplace. On every wall were curious pictures, suitable, I suppose, for the tastes of the whimsical artist of
Babar
. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, one of which had a double bed for the lady of the house, the other two tiny.

Everything smelled of the sea, and every morning Marie-Claude would dash off on her bicycle to do her
courses
, her shopping in the town market, which was covered and the size of a New York block. There, she would buy us the fish we would eat every night, broiled, the vegetables she'd make into a sumptuous ratatouille, and the tiny sardines that she'd decapitate, gut, and marinate and that we'd eat raw in olive oil and green peppercorns. Unpeeled potatoes she'd cook on top of the fire in a closed clay pot called a
diable
, which she'd rest on top of an asbestos pad over a low flame. That was a strange dish for the French, who normally are incapable of eating an unpeeled potato. They
would dry up and shrink and become deliciously charred in the
diable
—we'd eat them with salt and pepper and lavish lashings of butter.

It was a house consecrated to peace, beauty, and reading. MC always brought home fresh flowers, especially sunflowers and the hollyhocks that grew wild outside the gate and on abandoned plots on the island. She would arrange her vased flowers in a still life composed of that day's eggplant, tomatoes, purple-edged lettuce, and feathery fennel.

MC's daughter, Anne, was in her element, too. She worked day and night in the garden. She was an accomplished photographer who had published a book of pictures of ornate tombstones in Italy. She had also taken the definitive photo of Georges Perec, with his wild, Einstein hair, from which the French government had made an honorary stamp. (Imagine if the States made a stamp with John Ashbery's portrait, or if the UK made one of Ronald Firbank.)

Ré was the Hamptons of France. Because of high-speed trains, it was only three hours away from Paris. In my first days there, you had to take a ferryboat over to the island, but in the late eighties they built a bridge, which many people opposed because it made the island too accessible to hordes of day trippers. Luckily, MC's village of Ars-en-Ré was farther out on the island than the larger, more popular scenic port of Saint-Martin-de-Ré. Ars had been a fishing village for the working poor, but now politicians (including a prime minister, Alain Juppé) mingled there with writers, film directors, and actresses.

In the center of the village stood a church that had a bumpy, tapering steeple, half black and half white for maximum contrast and visibility to those at sea. Around the church were the post office, a newsstand, a café, and a snack bar. Down by the harbor were a couple of good restaurants and a shop selling expensive nautical wear and equipment (such as a brass circular compass and cut-glass liqueur bottles set in a mahogany caddy that would always right itself even when the boat was severely listing to one side). And there were all the moored boats, of all sizes and kinds, and the dry docks, and beyond, an antiques shop. Marie-Claude and I would often go walking out on the long, earth-filled breakwaters.

By some magical fetishism, I sometimes think that if I dialed old phone numbers of friends, long since dead, they'd answer even if, in those days, there was one less digit in the number than now. By the same token, I think that if I flew to Paris and took the TGV to La Rochelle and a hundred-dollar taxi to Marie-Claude's green door in its whitewashed wall, she'd be there, sitting in the garden, smoking, drinking good Lapsang souchong tea from a bumpy black metal teapot and a small glazed cup. She'd be in her rattan chaise longue, which she folded up at night and stored in the garden shed. There would be the pierced round metal picnic table painted a dull green and the matching hard-metal chairs under the fig tree (I understand why nudes are outfitted with fig leaves, which are enormous).

There was another building alongside the garden, a stone garage, with a bathroom attached to its side. The bathroom had the only shower, a toilet, and a large sink and vanity, as well as the washer-dryer. The whole setup reminded me of Junichiro Tanizaki's essay “In Praise of Shadows,” which begins with a description of a Japanese bathroom (all shadows and dim shoji screens and pine branches and wooden fixtures) and compares it favorably to Western bathrooms with their surgically bright surfaces, all antiseptic metal and porcelain. This bathroom definitely seemed on the Japanese end of the spectrum. Even its smells were those of fresh herbs, Proust's iris root, lavender soaps, Roger & Gallet Extra Vieille toilet water, and the ocean.

Upstairs, above the garage, was a large guest bedroom under the exposed beams with an unframed double bed on the floor covered with a nubby white fabric. A staircase dropped down and pulled up by rope-pulley. Double windows looked down on a small garden where every flowering plant was white. The room was full of lazy buzzing wasps and dead spiders immobilized in the center of sticky webs, white pebbles and gaudy shells brought back from the beach.

Late in the afternoon, in the summer, the sun didn't go down till ten o'clock. MC and I would bike to the beach, walk through a pine forest, and cross the dunes onto what the French called
une plage sauvage,
to distinguish it from a manicured beach with cabanas, like those along the Riviera. The beaches of Ré are dotted every half mile or so with a
massive series of concrete pillboxes built by the Nazis as a defense against a coastal Allied invasion. It would have taken a lot of dynamite to dislodge them from the dunes. The elements had tilted and shifted them and they'd become the make-out sites for teens, who'd left their empty booze bottles and used condoms on the uneven sandy floors; the walls inside and out were covered in graffiti.

The Atlantic coast, unlike the Mediterranean, is subject to major tides. The Atlantic-side beaches of Ré swoop gently toward the ocean floor and when the tide is out, miles of extra sand and rock are exposed, leaving pond-sized tidal pools and providing a happy hunting ground for gatherers of mussels and clams. At low tide, morning or evening, you can see bathers, bucket in hand, inspecting every uneven and algae-strewn stretch of wet sand for their supper.

Sometimes we'd go to a closer beach where there was a bar shack, and we'd have a drink before riding our bikes along the path on the top of a retaining wall. To get there, we'd have to bike through what the French call
un camping
, a vacation trailer camp that functions only in the warm weather. I suppose these camps, scattered throughout Ré, make it more democratic, as if the Hamptons on Long Island were host to many campgrounds; the poor in their trailers (what the French call caravans) were always present.

I've always suspected these French campings were witness to the hottest teenage sex in the country. While the parents from France and Germany and Holland reclined in plastic and aluminum chairs or cooked wieners on the portable grill, the adolescent girls and boys ran off together, excited by a sudden lack of supervision and the randy exoticism of all this freedom and all these nationalities. In fact, the now middle-aged French novelist Michel Houellebecq, author most famously of
The Elementary Particles
(
Les particules élémentaires
), and the great white hope of the French novel, has explored in the bitterest terms the laxity of his parents' generation—the
soixante-huitards
(sixty-eighters), with their sun-battered faces, receding hairlines, and gray ponytails (whose tents and trailers you still see in
campings
all over France)—and he blames them for the moral fecklessness of his own generation. As Houellebecq recounts it, the
campings
were notorious
wife-swapping (
échangiste)
venues—and at least as he'd like to tell it, the reason for so many divorces and fractured families and fucked-up offspring in France.

Many of MC's Paris friends had substantial summer houses on the rue du Palais in Ars, and we'd sometimes drop in on them for a drink. Her best friend was also named Marie-Claude, and is now buried next to MC on the Île de Ré under white rosebushes, rather than in MC's ghastly family crypt in the Montparnasse cemetery. Marie-Claude Dumoulin was an editor at
Elle,
her husband one at
Lui,
and their son one at
L'Express
. They were the most
knowing
family I'd ever met. There wasn't a single vacation hotspot in Cambodia they hadn't visited, a single new Romanian novelist they hadn't read, a single nautical race anywhere in the world they hadn't competed in, a single bid for power in the mayoral race of Clermont-Ferrand they hadn't already investigated and profiled. Marie-Claude Dumoulin knew everything about clothes and home furnishings, her husband was a tireless sailor, and their son was a crack political reporter. Conversations seldom got off the ground before taking a nosedive, because the Moulins weren't interested in ideas and were impatient with gossip. What they prized above all else was usable information, grist; but they all three already knew all about whatever subject you might mention.

Harry Mathews, who's lived in France since the fifties, told me that in his opinion every nation shares the faults of all others, but each nation has developed one fault to an extravagant degree. The French fault, he said, was always wanting to be right. A French person will deny the proof of his senses and all the savants of the world and cling to the notion that the world is flat, if he or she started out with that view. Concomitant to that fault is a simultaneous impatience with—and hunger for—the new. Impatience because admitting that something is new to you is humbling, information that has not already been absorbed. Hunger because the only way to one-up friends and relatives is to know the new before they do. The easiest tactic is to dismiss a new bit of information from the outset as not worth knowing. I remember traveling to Istanbul with MC and a stylish young Parisian, Guillaume Bouvier. As we entered the Grand Bazaar, the vast covered market,
with its hundreds of stalls, Guillaume said, “There's nothing here. Let's go,” and MC quickly concurred.

I exploded, “You've already dismissed the biggest bazaar in the world?”

I thought they might be right, as stand after stand sold the same aubergine-colored car coats and the same rubber tires, boxes of Tide and industrial dish towels. But then at the very center, within a locked cage, was an old mosque and the small jewelry district, with its antique brooches and rings and sand-blasted tea glasses from the 1940s—all the things we loved and would buy. Of course the French, like the Japanese, want their
luxe
to come from half a dozen brand names, such as Gucci or Hermès or Christofle, and it's no wonder that ripped-off products, such as Chinese copies of Izod shirts, are confiscated by French customs officers and the offenders are arrested and fined.

The French will not admit not knowing something. The most that they'll concede of their own ignorance is that they “no longer know it”: “
Je ne sais plus
.” At any museum exhibit in Paris, the biggest crowds aren't looking at the paintings but standing in front of the explanatory plaque telling the history and provenance of the whole concept of the show. Here is where the know-it-all culture vultures are feeding themselves so they can overwhelm their friends who've not yet seen the exhibit. The United States is a fractured culture in which every subgroup has its own website and fanzine, and no two
chapelles
(as the French call small in-groups) can or want to communicate with each other. The gun hobbyists don't want to know the antique doll collectors, who scorn collectors of black mammy cookie jars. But in France, there is still some sense of the collective, which is reinforced by this uniform “knowingness.”

Once the Dumoulins had heard about something or professed to know about it already, they immediately lost interest in hearing any more. Suddenly the subject had lost all of its savor.

On the Île de Ré, MC had her athletic side. She could swim vigorously for half an hour in the freezing Atlantic. She loved to bicycle long distances, through the fields beyond which the black and white church tower of Ars floated and shifted, like the twin Combray steeples in
Proust endlessly playing with each other. Ré was famous for its salt farmers (usually old women), who would fill ditches with seawater, let it burn off in the sun, then rake the salt into piles; this is the salt that sells for twenty dollars a bottle at Zabar's in New York or Hédiard in Paris. The utterly flat land, the huge, blue skies animated by soft white clouds lined in gray, the steeple dancing over the green fields, the Wordsworthian solitude of the lady salt farmer bent over in the drained ditch, the sun's warmth on the back of one's neck—these were some of the exhilarating elements of a bike ride to the next village. It might be Saint-Clément-des-Baleines (St. Clement of the Whales), the snobby Les Portes-en-Ré, or the “big-city” commune of Saint-Martin, with its handsome prison, which always makes me think of Manon's deportation to Louisiana.