Lisette's List (43 page)

Discouraged, I entered the mouth of a cave a little way up an incline just to rest in the coolness. Leaning against the rough wall, I dozed until the plaintive cooing of a mourning dove roused me. Just outside the cave opening, a pair of them were going about their sweet pecking business together, always aware of the whereabouts of each other. For a few moments, the world felt complete and harmonious. One flew off, and the other followed. Heartened, I proceeded with my search, crawling on hands and knees deeper into the cave.

A pile of creamy rocks, either ochre or limestone, shone in the shaft of light from my torch. I crawled toward it and began to dismantle the pile. At the level of the ground, I touched rough cloth. A burlap sack! In it, the texture of a painting on canvas. I thought my chest would burst. I felt like shouting, like dancing, like flying. I chuckled at the absurdity that not only had I randomly wandered into the thief’s hiding place for shelter, but the evil thief had graciously provided a burlap sack. I brought it to the cave opening and took out the canvas. My ecstatic squeal brought bats flying out of the mouth of the cave. Cézanne’s
Quarry of Bibémus
hidden in a quarried canyon! How droll. Was this just blind coincidence, or was the thief teasing me?

Clutching it against my chest in the sack, I slithered down the incline, landed on my derrière, and started off at a delirious trot. After some minutes, I stopped, bewildered. Nothing looked familiar.

Retracing my steps, I couldn’t even find the opening to the cave. I wandered in one direction and another until I had to admit that I was utterly lost, confused, overheated, and frightened. The different angle of the sun had changed the colors and created unfamiliar shadows during the time I had been inside. The shadows of pinnacles now stretched across paths like grasping fingers. A dozen times
I turned in a circle, panicked, feeling that stinging sensation behind my eyes that comes just before tears, and then I forced myself to stop and think. I would have to walk uphill to get out. With that logic, I took any opening between trees and rocks that was inclined uphill.

The afternoon sun hammered on the top of my head, making me squint against its glare. Sweat dripped into my eyes and plastered my cotton blouse to my back. I rolled André’s trousers up above my knees for some relief from the heat. I felt nauseous, dizzy, on the verge of fainting. Then I saw only swirling gray shapes against black, and my mind went blank. I came to, sprawled on the ground, with my face buried in a clump of gray rockrose, not knowing how long I had been there. Slowly, colors emerged from the grayness of my vision, retreating, emerging again, pulsating. I put my head between my knees until the dizziness eventually cleared, and tried to swallow moisture to ease my parched throat, to no avail. What good was a painting when I could die of heatstroke?

I remembered Pascal telling us to let the paintings care for us. All right. I would. I took the painting out of the sack to diminish the weight, held the stiff canvas over my head for shade, and rested until I felt steady enough to go on, stopping to catch my breath often, my upraised arms aching.

Eventually, far ahead, the pinnacle that resembled an obelisk stood like a beacon. I let out a cry of relief.

“Lisette!” I heard. Or was I hallucinating?

“Lisette!”

I kept climbing, holding the painting above my head.

“Lisette!”

Bernard came running downhill toward me, slipping and catching himself, holding an open umbrella and carrying an earthenware jug.

“Oh, my darling!” he cried as he reached me and lowered me down onto a rock. “I saw your shoes and I hurried down. You should never have come here by yourself. Didn’t I warn you?”

I set the painting aside while he poured water into the cup of his hand, and I slurped it up. He poured it over my face and head and throat and swished it down my arms, and I let him, vaguely conscious of a new intimacy.

“I’ve been crazy with worry at the thought that you had come to harm.”

I drank out of his palm again.

“Not too much,” he warned. “You’ll need it as we go up.”

“I found a painting,” I said weakly.

“I see that.” He puffed out a breath and shook his head. “And I also see that you will go to extreme lengths—”

“I have no choice.”

“At least I get another look at those pretty knees.”

Instinctively, I glanced down at them and found that bat guano had stuck to my knees and shins. “Ugh!” I cried, pulling my pant legs over them. His soft chuckle did not offend me. My exasperation with him was milder this time. In fact, I was grateful. When my breathing returned to normal and the water had cooled me, I let him pull me upright. He put the jug in my right hand and the umbrella in my left hand, closing my fingers around it. A memory of a man’s hand wrapping my fingers around the handle of another umbrella streaked across my mind, but I refused to allow myself to make a connection. Bernard carried the painting and took the liberty of putting his arm around my waist to help me walk uphill. I was too weak to resist.

At the road up to his house I handed back the umbrella and jug.

“Don’t think I’m going to let you walk home now. You’re coming to my house to rest and to eat something.”

He let me wash in the bathroom sink. A working faucet! Warm water! Oh, what luxury. I saw myself in the mirror and shuddered. My hair was caked with orange powder, and dirt striped my cheeks and arms. A fresh bar of lavender soap lay in a saucer, making me suspicious that he had put it there especially for me. It was stamped with
L
’
OCCITANE
, just like the bar of soap he’d put in my lavender
pot. I tried to reason what this might mean. If Occcitan was the former language of Provence, as Maurice had said, then
occitane
, ending with an
e
, might mean “woman of Occitania.” Was Bernard suggesting that I was that woman of Occitania? That he wanted me to see myself as such? That I belonged here?

I soaped my face and legs and arms, filled the basin and dunked my head in, rinsing it as well as I could. But what to dry it on? It would stain his towel.

“Don’t worry about the towel,” he said from the kitchen. “It will be my souvenir of today.”

When I came into the dining room with wet hair and dirty clothes, he said, “You look radiant.” I felt myself blush, knowing full well that I looked bedraggled.

He served us both
poulet fricassée
with small, whole onions, carrots, celery, and mushrooms in a lemon-and-nutmeg sauce. I ate ravenously.

“My chicken never tastes this good. You are an excellent chef.”

“I’ve learned a few things over the last eleven years.”

We passed some minutes eating quietly. There existed a harmony in this house that surprised me and allowed me to relax. I could hardly believe him to be the same man as the one who had been so insolent years earlier.

“I’m glad you found a painting.”

Strangely, he did sound sincere.

He propped it up on the sideboard.

“It’s by Cézanne. Pascal loved it because it’s an ochre quarry.”

“Is that so? Then whoever put it there had a devilish sense of humor.”

The conversation came to an abrupt halt. I set down my fork, suspicious. His face was unreadable. Against Maxime’s advice, I was tempted to ask him for permission to look in the two remaining windmills, but if he said no, that would only alert him to our clandestine intentions.

“You should have seen yourself tramping up the hill holding it
over your head like the spoils won by a conquering hero. Or, rather, heroine.”

We finished the meal but sat rooted to our chairs, unsure of how to move the conversation to other topics.

“Is this your favorite painting?”

“No. There is one with a girl and a goat on a path alongside her vegetable plot. I love that one. I feel a strong personal connection to it.”

“But this one, any one, moves you one step closer to leaving Roussillon.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. Another would be that I have found my lost painting and can take pleasure in seeing it again, and I can give it its rightful place in the legacy of French art.”

He seemed to consider that for a few minutes, as though the larger thought had never occurred to him. “Maybe I could think of it that way too if it didn’t mean your time here is shorter now.” He clasped his hands, leaned forward on his forearms, and looked silently at the table. Eventually, he raised his head and studied me. “Forgive me if I hope that finding them takes a long time.”

That left us both thinking thoughts at cross-purposes. Hesitantly, I asked if he had gone to Paris.

“Not yet. I’m waiting for your answer.”

“Once you said you were not a patient man.”

“You remember wrongly. I said I
was
patient, but only up to a point. You are teaching me patience.”

“It’s a hard thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A very hard thing.”

“You have been kind to me.”

“No. I have been rude. Worse than rude.”

“I am putting all that behind us.” At the risk of offending him, I added, “But my answer hasn’t changed.”

“Yet.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

J’AI DEUX AMOURS

1948

“W
E
’
LL BE TRESPASSING, YOU KNOW
,” M
AXIME SAID TO
Maurice in his courtyard, under Louise’s disapproving eye.

Maurice’s bushy eyebrows crawled toward each other in an exaggerated scowl. With the speed of a thought, it changed to a grin. “No! We are the rectifiers of a wrong, just like the knights of Occitania. Are you prepared to fight with sword and dagger for our rightful booty?” He held up a long crowbar and a short, hooked pry bar.

“Don’t clown around, Maurice,” Louise said. “This is serious.” She turned to Maxime. “If I didn’t love him, I would whip him into shape, but whipping would have no effect.”

“Serious, indeed. And we will be successful.” Maxime raised a fist high with his index finger extended. “I will not go back to Paris until we find a painting.”

“Is that a promise?” I asked.

“ ‘The day of glory has arrived.
Marchons! Marchons!
’ ” he sang, saluting Maurice.

It was surprising to see him adopting the Provençal temperament. His playfulness, exaggerated gestures, and theatricality I
took to be evidence of his exultation at having sold a painting for Monsieur Laforgue, as well as the result of Maurice’s influence.

“ ‘Aux armes, citoyens!’ ”
Maurice sang, holding aloft the pry bar.

Louise shook her head at Maurice. “Tonight you
citoyen
of France ought to kneel and thank heaven for giving you a wife who loves you enough to put up with your antics.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Maurice said in the heavily accented English of Maurice Chevalier. “Wonderful to be in love with you.” Then, with a little dance step, he launched into song, also in English: “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise.”

Maxime joined in: “Birds in the trees seem to twitter Louise.”

Maurice held his hand over his heart and sang: “Can it be true, someone like you could love me, Louise?”

I applauded.

“Ouf! Go on, all of you,” Louise said.

W
E SET OUT AT MIDNIGHT
with a ladder, a rope, and the encouragement of having drunk a bottle of Émile’s rosé.

“Be careful,” Louise cautioned at the doorway. “Don’t do anything dangerous.”

“Ha! Art must always be dangerous,” Maxime said.

I was hopeful. The week prior, Maurice and I had driven by the Moulin de l’Auro and had seen the door ajar. Now we climbed into Maurice’s bus, which was again working on gas, with the cumbersome firebox removed, and crept along by moonlight without headlights.

The Moulin de l’Auro, our first windmill, dealt a severe blow to our clandestine operations. Tonight the door was secured with a padlock. Something was afoot. Did it mean there was a painting inside? We had to get in. There was a small window about three meters above the ground. Maurice patted his round belly. It was
evident at once who should enter. I had had the foresight to wear André’s trousers.

As much as possible, we worked without lighting our battery torches and without talking. Maurice propped the ladder against the windmill, and Maxime rigged a harness of the rope around my waist and under my arms. He went up first with the pry bar to loosen a screen. It was so rusty that it fell off with a clatter that made us wince. He came down, and then it was my turn, with him close behind me on the ladder. Held steady by Maxime, I entered the window feet first, then turned onto my stomach while Maxime and Maurice lowered me down with the rope until my feet touched solid earth.

Aiming my torch downward, I peered into every crevice, looked beneath a pile of grain sacks, examined each one, upended barrels, and felt around the central shaft. My hands discovered levers, gears, wheels, ropes, but no painting.

I climbed the steps to the second level, where the two massive grindstones lay horizontally, one on top of the other. The space between them would be a perfect hiding place, but how would anyone get a painting in there? It would have to be the miller, who would know which rope to hoist.

Just under the rounded cap of the windmill near my house was where I had found Pissarro’s
La Petite Fabrique
, beneath neatly piled wooden blocks. Here, the blocks were scattered. They hid nothing. I went back down, my hope punctured, and was reaching for the rope, the signal to hoist me up, when my head hit something soft that moved, startling me.

“Wait!”

I investigated what seemed to be a suspended canvas funnel. Nothing was inside it. I moved a barrel beneath the window, climbed onto it, and gave the rope three hard yanks. Slowly, I felt myself being hoisted up.

We had high hopes about the other windmill, Moulin de Ferre,
where Monsieur Saulnier had found the study of heads, thinking that he might have overlooked other paintings. It was unlocked. Jittery because this windmill was visible from Bernard’s property, we searched quickly, not overlooking any possible place. No painting. Afraid that Bernard would appear out of nowhere, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.