Lisette's List (10 page)

Points of light appeared on his wet lashes, and then full round
tears spilled onto his lower lids. I walked over to the doorway to the courtyard and motioned to André to come inside. He brushed sawdust off his clothes, took one look at Pascal, and sat down next to his grandfather. He laid his head on Pascal’s shoulder and reminded him of how he, Pascal, had once made a small wooden boat and rigged it with a handkerchief sail and a tow string for André to sail in the pond of the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris.

“I remember.” Pascal sucked in a long, rattling breath. “You were still in short pants. You fell and skinned your knee and let go of the string. I waded into the pond to retrieve it.”

“Wearing your Sunday trousers.”

“Oh, life.” A sigh erupted from some deep, private place. “I came back to Roussillon because I wanted to feel young again with my good friends, and now I feel old. How does it happen, André?”

I held my breath, waiting, wondering, while André searched for the words. “Little by little.”

T
HE SPRING AND SUMMER
of 1938 slipped quietly into autumn, the diminishing season, when the
cigales
stopped their scratchy mating calls, laid their eggs underground, and died. Farmers left their fields fallow. Black figs disappeared from the market stalls and were replaced with Marseille figs, which Pascal called “the pope’s balls,” chuckling at my shock. Three-day rains sent Pascal and André to the café earlier than usual, where they grumbled over their
apéritifs
. They came home talking of men’s things, hunts for
sanglier
, the wild boar of the Monts de Vaucluse, while this woman’s appreciation of petals had to wait for half a year.

There were trying days, heavy days, turbulent days. Pascal’s habits began to irritate me. He slurped his
grand café
and swished it around his mouth and let the bowl slam down on the table, splashing the oilcloth. Morsels of food clung to his mustache. It was unpleasant to pick them off, so I offered to trim his mustache. That brought on a fit of crying. I hadn’t meant to embarrass him.

He was constantly clearing his throat in a guttural way, saying, “I have to tell you …,” then demanding that I stop moving even when what he wanted to relate to me flitted away like a moth.

Apparently he overcame his humiliation about not being able to fire or point because he began going to the
boules
terrain again, but I suspected it was only to watch. I noticed that Monsieur Voisin, the café owner, had moved a chair with arms next to the players’ bench so Pascal could push himself up from it. After the first sign of cool weather, I insisted that he wear his winter overcoat. He fussed at me, saying that I was overdressing him, as if he were Saint George going out to slay a dragon, but he eventually relented.

Once after he went to the café to play
belote
, he came home grumbling, holding on to the bent arm of a man I didn’t recognize. André greeted him as though they were acquainted and introduced him as Bernard Blanc, the
garde champêtre
, constable of the commune, which consisted of the village and its surrounding farms, orchards, and pastures. André invited him inside.

“I found Pascal teetering in place de la Mairie, so I thought I had better help him home,” the constable told us.

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you,” André said.

Irritated, and maybe even ashamed, Pascal extricated himself from the constable’s grasp, collapsed onto a chair, and said, “Now that you’re here, young man, you might as well take a look at the paintings.”

He did so, standing in front of each one, so tall he tilted his head down to look at them, not saying anything while André and Pascal watched him.

“A fine collection. Are they by well-known painters?”

“By
famous
painters!” Pascal bellowed. “Pissarro and Cézanne!”

The constable nodded, as if he knew the names, but something told me he didn’t. After a few minutes, André saw him to the door and stepped outside with him, thanking him again.

A
NDRÉ AND
M
AURICE MOVED
Pascal’s bed downstairs because Pascal complained that his sitting bones ached when he sat on the bare wood chairs. I worried on the days when he slept long hours, his breathing like pebbles pouring out of a jar, his mouth open, his head at an angle, drool darkening his shirt. With André working in the courtyard or going back and forth to Avignon, who would urge Pascal to eat if I weren’t here? Who would bathe and shave him, rub his feet, put cool cloths on his forehead when he was feverish, sit with him and listen endlessly? It was right that I was here. This was now holy ground.

Once he risked his balance and lunged across the room, teetering toward me.

“You won’t go back to Paris before …”

“No, Pascal. We’ll be with you.”

“You will be happy again in Paris.”

“I am happy now, with you.”

“How old am I?”

“When were you born?”

“In 1852.”

“Then you’re eighty-six.”

“Eighty-six,” he said with wonder. “Who would have thought I would live so long?”

“And still be handsome.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one. Twenty-two in November.”

“I want to ask you something,
minette
.”

“Anything you want.”

A bashful look came over his face and he stroked my cheek. “Will you call me Papa?”

“Yes, Papa. I’m happy to call you Papa.” Descending softly, the word sounded both strange and right. I couldn’t remember ever saying it before, certainly never to the ghostly father who’d left me at the orphanage like a sack of grain, then went to some far-off country and died there, my mother too.

W
E KNEW WINTER HAD
come when the silence of the countryside was pierced by the reports of hunters’ rifles and the raucous barking of dogs. Woodsmoke from the burning of the vines and the oily scent of olives being pressed rose to our hilltop perch. Ice crystals formed on the moss of the village washbasin. That suggested that a harder winter than the last one lay ahead. More mistrals. Colder ones.

Pascal normally had a throw-open-the-windows-in-winter attitude, but now he complained that it was as cold in the house as it had been in the mine. He fell asleep breathing cold air, woke up choking, and struggled to say through stiff blue lips that the mine had collapsed on him. Contradicting him would make him angry or feel foolish. “How terrible!
Grâce à Dieu
, you weren’t killed,” I said, letting him have his imagined moment of triumphant survival.

He drifted into a reverie, naming the hues made from the ochres of the Usine Mathieu, the pigment factory on the outskirts of Roussillon.
“Rouge pompéi, fleur de guesde, cuir de Russie
. I sold them all in Paris.
Jaune nankin, prune de monsieur, désir amoureux.”

I told him I liked hearing the names.

“Maurice was much younger, so he had to wait some years before he could work. Because he could pickax right-handed and left-handed, he was the miner of progress, like a captain, pickaxing at the farthest point of our gallery. The rest of us chiseled and scraped and dug out the ore from the walls. Fifteen meters high, those passages. We made them arch perfectly so they didn’t need wooden beams, and when you looked down the gallery line, each arch appeared smaller than the one closer. It looked like a cathedral, Lisette, and we
made
it. Even the life of a miner is worth living when you recognize beauty.”

He had called the passageways galleries. “Then the mine was a showcase of your work,” I said.

He nodded, pleased with me. “There were bats in those galleries. Scared the piss out of us when they streaked by our heads.” He chuckled at the memory, but that lasted only a minute. His expression darkened. “Some of the mines are shutting down now. You can’t tell me they aren’t. You don’t see as many men coming home wearing clothes caked with ochre. That can’t mean anything good.”

O
NE MORNING
P
ASCAL THUDDED
down his coffee bowl and pushed himself upright. “I’m going to the ochre quarries. The colors glow at this hour.”

“No, Papa. The cliffs are too dangerous.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. And don’t follow me.”

I burst out crying.

“You are too sensitive.” He slammed the door behind himself.

André was in Avignon, repairing the massive, elaborately-tooled dining table in the Palais des Papes, and would return with the first two of the twenty-four carved chairs to mend and restore the carving at home, an important commission. He had ridden Maurice’s bus and wouldn’t be back until the next day. I fretted about Pascal’s impulsive departure, then threw on my coat and went after him.

He could be anywhere along the lane—in the café, at the
terrain de boules
, inside the
boulangerie
, talking to Odette and René, who often gave him a warm slice of olive bread. I hurried downhill, poking my nose into places where I might find him. The quarries were beyond the lower end of the village, somewhere in the ochre canyons. I went uphill first, past the cemetery to the entrance to the canyons, then down into them a short way. I understood why he wanted to see them at this time. They did glow golden ochre, orange, and the red of paprika. If he went too far, it would be hard to find him, and he would have trouble climbing back.

I slipped on the places still wet from the recent rain, and stained
my shoes with orange mud. Frightened, I called his name. He was nowhere. I needed the help of Constable Blanc, so I turned back to ask for him at the
mairie
, the town hall.

Passing alongside the graveyard, I had a hunch and peered between oleander bushes, then entered through the iron gate by a tall, lone cypress, which cast a gray, shroudlike shadow across the closest tomb. Wind whistled through the tops of pines and rustled the leaves in the olive orchard above and behind the tombs. Every
Roussillonnais
family knew their place of rest. Alongside a small oleander whipped by the wind, the Roux family vault lay in full sunlight. With both palms on the stone slab to support himself, Pascal was leaning forward, breathing hard.

I approached cautiously. His shoes were not filmed over with ochre dust or orange mud. He either had been afraid to venture down or had gotten distracted.

“You shouldn’t have followed me,” he said, sensing my presence, still looking at the tomb, “but I knew you would.”

“I was worried, Papa. I’m not strong enough to help you get up if you fall.”

“You can’t control everything, Lisette. There is a time to let things be.”

He patted the stone tomb and chuckled. “I’m not really going to be in this box. Instead, I’m going to follow Cézanne wherever he goes and carry his easel and canvas and paints, so he can paint unencumbered the glories of heaven. So vast, so infinite that making a frame around them is impossible. The other side has beautiful colors that we can’t imagine on this side. Cézanne said so. Oh, happy days ahead.”

F
ATIGUÉ
PASSED INTO
TRÉS FATIGUÉ
, and it was hard to get Pascal out of bed to go to the outhouse. I tended to him where he lay, using a bedpan.

“Such love you show me. Like a daughter’s. It will make the end easier.” He let out a quavering sigh. “But there’s more to tell. About Cézanne especially. Can you find my list?”

When I brought it to him, he said,
“Eh, bieng,”
in the Provençal accent he used when he spoke about Cézanne. “The painting called
The Card Players
. I haven’t told you about that. Two
Provençaux
playing
belote
at a small table with a bottle of wine between them. Maybe that was the prize for the winner. I liked the game, but I never seemed to pluck the right cards from the stack, so I wasn’t any good at it.”

Maurice came that afternoon to bring us honey from his hives. “Here. This will make you feel better. My bees are descendants of those buzzing around the rosemary in the garden of the pope’s palace in Avignon.”