Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  At home I noticed the water-smeared postmark. Roussillon. Not Paris. It had to be from Bernard. The date was obliterated. Had he carried it in the rain? I opened it to Dearest Lisette, presumptuous as always. In his own mixed-up mind, though, I supposed he genuinely felt that way.

  You must know how deeply I regret entering your house uninvited. It was the unbridled act of a passionate man, an awkward, desperate man of the country untrained in the niceties that you, a Parisienne and a lady, deserve. My foolish hope was that you might feel more comfortable and free in your own house than in mine. I feared that my time to win your affection was running out. I was oblivious to the hour. Please believe this above all—I came not knowing what I would do. In any case, I had intended to be tender, merely offering. Despite what I have shown, I do have that capacity. Discovering that a man was with you, I instantly felt embarrassment and shame for my ill-conceived action. I would have left, but by that time, he was on me.

  I have been troubled ever since by not knowing a way to apologize and to have you feel my genuine sincerity. I have finally thought of a way, and if you come to the cemetery some afternoon, I will see you and come down the ravine and we can make a promenade together. I will watch for you every day at two o’clock, hoping that you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

  Humbly, your devoted

  Bernard

  I read the letter twice, three times. In spite of his prior vacillation between aggressiveness and retreat, his apology struck me as earnest. Sister Marie Pierre had always advised me to give others the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was naïve, like André had often said. Maybe I too easily believed Bernard’s protests of good intentions, but his tone of contrition here was different from how he spoke before his declaration of a truce in his dining room. Except for this most egregious intrusion, he had done nothing after the truce to annoy or taunt me.

  But to forgive him? If his intrusion had caused the ruin of my relationship with Maxime, I didn’t know how I ever could. Yet a surprising seed of softness told me it would be unkind to deny him his effort at reconciliation. If I didn’t, then living in the same village where I could run into him any day would make me nervous. It was better to confront him by intention rather than by accident. I had to see him, even if it was just to determine my feelings and to find out how far I was from forgiving.

  More rain tore through the village the next day, beating the roof, pocking the earth, sliding down windowpanes in sheets. I would be a fool to go out in it. The next day was the same. On the third day, the sky cleared and the sun ventured out, and so did I. The plaster walls had absorbed the rain, and where Louise’s house was pale yellow-ochre in dry weather, it was now a rich golden ochre. All the buildings and surrounding cliffs had taken on deeper tones, even tangerine, ruby red, and burgundy, enchanting me with love for the village.

  I arrived at the cemetery at the appointed time without mishap but with apprehension. He was there, standing on the edge of the red-orange cliff.

  “Lisette! Wait just one minute. Don’t leave.”

  He backed through the orchard and came out carrying a pair of tall rubber galoshes and an umbrella, then scrambled down the eroded ravine.

  Out of breath, he said, “I had almost given up hope. I’ve been out here every day at two o’clock.”

  “Even in the rain?”

  “Every day.”

  A tight knot of resistance loosened a little.

  He asked if it was too cool to take a walk. When I agreed to go, he offered the galoshes. Too small for him, they must have been his wife’s. Inside each one was a thick sock. He held me by the shoulders while I pulled them on.

  He said nothing about his intrusion or the fight—too mortified, probably. That was good. I didn’t want to have to search my heart to condemn or to forgive just yet.

  He suggested going to see the Usine Mathieu, the ochre works where ore was refined into pigments. It seemed an odd thing to do, but since I had never been there, I agreed.

  From the cemetery we walked toward the village a little way, then turned off onto a narrow avenue that inclined steeply downhill. The houses became sparse and were surrounded by fruit trees, whose damp petals lay on the ground. One last red-roofed cottage had a vegetable garden, but the lettuce and beet greens and onion stalks had been beaten down by the storms, just like mine had been. As we walked he named the trees—oak, buckthorn, Spanish juniper, pistachio, on the right side below the road. And on the hill above us on the left, maple, snowball tree, and Aleppo pines.

  We turned onto a lane leading to a large estate.

  “The owners are away and have left me in charge, so we can visit the garden,” he said.

  We followed a promenade lined with plane trees toward an octagonal pool, each side of which was a bordered flower bed, the plants flattened and wet. “I was hoping to show it to you before the rains ruined it.” Terraces and a balustrade led to the main house, which was grander than any I had seen in Roussillon. When I exclaimed at its beauty, Bernard chuckled. “I could show you a dozen more, hidden from the roads by hedges and woods. There are big landowners here. When this family returns, I will be invited to a grand soirée, and I am permitted to bring a companion. You.”

  He gave me a sideways glance to ascertain the effect of his words.

  “As garde champêtre, I have the responsibility to protect farms, orchards, vineyards, wineries, olive oil mills, mines, quarries, and factories, so I’m free to show you the Usine Mathieu, where Pascal worked. Monsieur Mathieu was not the first to make pigment from ore. The process was discovered before him, in the late eighteenth century.”

  He was obviously trying to impress me with what he knew, with his position, and with Roussillon.

  We turned onto a gravel drive that led to the ochre works, two buildings and a series of large open concrete sheds, each containing a huge furnace. Men nodded to Bernard and went right on stoking the furnaces with wood.

  “You can see by the powder on the floors and on their clothing what color each furnace is producing. Farther down the hill are the original basins. They haven’t been used for many years, since the operation was moved to another part of the property. I’ll show you.”

  As we walked through a forest of oak trees, he explained that the ochre ore, quarried or mined, had to be separated from sand. It was ninety percent sand and ten percent pigments, he said. Pulverized ore of each color was first flushed with water, which ran through large-diameter pipes. Managing the flow of water was done by boys called washers.

  “Pascal worked as a washer when he was a boy,” I said.

  “So did I, a generation later. Almost every fourteen-year-old boy in Roussillon did, unless he was the son of a farmer who needed him. There used to be twenty such factories and a thousand ochre workers and miners in the area.”

  Every pipe we saw had once emptied into its own narrow concrete canal, and for every canal, lower down the incline, there were several different levels of large rectangular concrete basins, some of them now cracked and overgrown with weeds.

  “They are the old decantation beds. Each evening a flux of ochre, sand, and water was sent through the pipes to the canals and basins. The sand is heavy and sank quickly, while the ochre in suspension flowed down the canals into the basins. Throughout the night, when the water was still, the ochre settled at the bottom. In the morning, the water on the surface was released through small locks. In this way, the basins were filled with successive layers of ochre. When the ochre attained a thickness of fifty centimeters, no more water mix was allowed in, and the ochre remained in the basins for six months in order to dry. Then it was cut into bars and sent to the furnaces, where workers refined the colors by heating them at various temperatures for different lengths of time.”

  Bernard seemed pleased to explain the process. He looked from one canal and its pipe to another.

  “I think this was the one I worked.” He went back uphill a few steps. “No, I think it was that one.” He stepped over a c
anal and helped me across. “I know how to tell.” He walked up to the pipe and looked back to make sure I was following. All the pipes had wooden plugs about the diameter of a dinner plate. He wiggled this one until it came out.

  “Reach inside,” he said.

  “No! There could be spiders in there.”

  He peered in. “No spiders. Reach in.”

  I had a premonition, so I did reach inside and felt the familiar roughness of a painting rolled inward loosely. I tugged at the edge. It came out easily and fell open.

  “Pissarro’s goat girl! My favorite! This is no coincidence. You knew!”

  He raised his shoulders. His expression of acknowledgment was unreadable. Was it sadness? Embarrassment? Shame? I couldn’t tell.

  “It was you all along! Hiding all of the paintings. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said, barely audibly.

  “How did you get them?” I demanded. “How could you possibly have known?”

  “You have to believe me. I didn’t steal them.” He took a deep breath. “André told me where they were.”

  “What? I don’t believe you. He never—”

  “He thought it would be foolish not to tell a second person in Roussillon.”

  “But why you? And why did you take them?”

  “He told me to. He had only a few hours to remove them from their frames and work them off their stretchers and hide them. He never intended for them to remain under the woodpile. He wanted them hidden in safer places, each one in a different place. That way, if someone found one, that person wouldn’t find them all. I only did what he asked me to.”

  It took me some minutes to grasp the truth. In a way, it was a relief to find out that André had confided in the garde champêtre—in his mind, the proper person. He had trusted Bernard, the arm of the law, to return them.

  “Why didn’t you give them to me when the war was over and the Germans had left? That was wrong of you.”

  “I know. I know. Please try to understand. I couldn’t bear the thought of you leaving once you had your paintings back.”

  I felt my cheeks flush with anger.

  “I’m so sorry that I put you through this long, drawn-out ordeal. For a while, I actually didn’t know what I would do with them, but I admit, I wanted the search to take a long time. You see, I was falling in love with you. There. I said it.”

  “And so causing me anxiety was your way of expressing love? Bursting into my house at night was your way of expressing love?”

  “It was wrong of me. Both things were wrong of me. But then a strange thing occurred. I began to hope that you would find them, for your sake, even though that would hasten the time when you would leave Roussillon. I couldn’t tell you outright that I had hidden them or had them—that would make you hate me. But whenever I discovered that you had found one, I was both happy for you and sad for myself. Do you see how conflicted I was? I was in a desperate state the night I came to your house. I thought I might confess everything to you, lay my soul bare, and then leave. I didn’t come to molest you.”

  Stunned, I stepped back a step and shook my head.

  “Did you perhaps notice?” he asked softly. “I put the paintings in places that represented a feature of the region—the mine, the ochre canyon, a little borie in a melon field, the windmill close to your house so that you would find it. But not in any sad, dilapidated house, or derelict cabanon, or smelly pigeonnier. Nowhere ugly or depressing.”

  “What about the dump? You put a Picasso in the dump!”

  “No. That had to have been someone else. I would never have done that, Lisette. I put it in Moulin de Ferre.”

  “Why all of these carefully chosen places?”

  “In my own clumsy way, I thought that your search might lead you to appreciate what we have here, and might make you want to stay. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t begun to search for them. I would have had to return them all to you together, I supposed, but I kept putting it off. I felt sure that doing that would make you leave Roussillon forever.”

  “But now? What about now? Why did you lead me to this painting?”

  “Because as I began to understand your love for the paintings, I couldn’t bear the thought of you not having the one you love above all the others. I began to feel another kind of love, a better kind. I don’t know how to say it.” His mouth was drawn to the side. “I know I have ruined any chance with you.”

  Then a deeper issue crossed my mind. I thought of the silk stockings, the sausages, and the chicken.

  “You had another purpose at first, didn’t you? During the Occupation, before you came to know me? The paintings would be wanted by Vichy officials. You could use them to buy favor.” I felt my lips purse. Accusation lay on the tip of my tongue. “You didn’t care that the Nazis were taking over France? That meant nothing to you? You know, I could charge you not just as a thief but as a collaborator.”

  His eyes revealed the grave risk he had taken today. They asked what he did not dare put into words: I trust you not to betray me.

  “The Germans didn’t get any valuable information from me. I was able to placate the scouts with false leads, at my own peril. There was a reason I aligned myself with Vichy. If the Germans were aware that the constable of Roussillon was supporting the Occupation, that might save our village from the fates of Gordes and Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt.”

  For the first time, the possibility of an attack on Roussillon struck me as real. Two important citizens had been part of the Résistance—Maurice with his bus and Aimé, now the mayor. “Do you mean to say that if Maurice or Aimé were known to have caused the explosion of a German convoy—”

  “The Germans would have retaliated. Maurice was not terribly secretive,” Bernard explained.

  “No, I suppose not. His nature is too exuberant for stealth.”

  “German scouts had their eyes on those two British women and that Irish fellow too. One mistake by any of the five, and Roussillon would have been destroyed.”

  That Bernard had risked his reputation for the safety of Roussillon settled heavily on me. But was that equal to fighting in the Résistance, or in the war itself? This was too big an issue for me to resolve at the moment. I thought of Héloïse saying there were degrees of collaboration. I had not judged her. With my eyes, I said what Bernard needed to know: I don’t understand you completely and probably never will, but I do understand you enough now not to reveal any of this.

  “One more thing. I know you haven’t found the last painting.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You will never find it. I had to give one away. I chose the largest. I thought that would satisfy them. But you must know this. If I had not taken them from the woodpile, as André had instructed me, and if you had found them there and removed them, I am sure they would have hurt you to get them.”

  The rubber bludgeon flashed across my mind.

  “So if you hadn’t removed them, the Germans would have gotten them. But how did that officer know I had any paintings?”

  “Someone told. Someone who could benefit by giving that information. Someone did that ransacking, don’t forget. It wasn’t me. I suspect Mayor Pinatel might have been the one. To ingratiate himself with the new regime, in order to keep his position or get a more important one. I’m sorry for what I’ve done, what I thought I had to do, but I thought it might be the only way to get them to leave you alone. I was praying that you would tell that lieutenant before he hurt you and that then, seeing your shock and disappointment, he would let you go.”

  I needed time to sort everything out. Bernard had put me through an unjustifiable sorrow, perhaps even the loss of Maxime, though he could not have anticipated that. And yet without him, the paintings would surely have been lost. He’d collaborated to the degree he felt would do no harm and would save his village and neighbors—and yet he had sought to appease evil, not to fight it. His motives were both honorable and dishonorable. All I could conclude wa
s that he was thoroughly human.

  I gazed down at the painting.

  “I’m glad you didn’t give them this one. I have lived this painting, Bernard. It is my life in paint.”

  My tears spilled—because of the girl’s innocent trust, because I had thought I would never see her again, because of the white goat in the painting, because of ending Geneviève’s life.

  I told Bernard about having to do that. He drew me to his chest, and I didn’t resist. He was of the country, so he could understand, in a way Max never would, the sorrow of slaughtering a goat that had become a friend. What Maxime had to do to maintain his equanimity prevented him from contemplating slaughter. But Bernard knew a less complicated grief.

  “It’s not just the beauty of the painting that I love. It’s more—the truth of it. See how the girl is walking along a path that curves? She can’t see where it leads, but she has to go on anyway.”

  Gently, Bernard laid his hand on my head. “Like all of us, for better or worse.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THE LETTER AND THE SONG

  1948

  9 MAY 1948

  Dearest Maxime,

  The first acquired is home at last. And the study of heads as well. I am on fire with them. You must come. I will disclose the last mystery of Roussillon only to you. You must promise to tell no one. This has to be handled with the utmost delicacy.

  Do not berate yourself, Max, about that encounter. When I was a little girl, Sister Marie Pierre made me memorize this: To every thing there is a season. A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.

  Take that to heart and come for the Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Midsummer Night, and we shall dance around the bonfire at the Castrum and look over the cliffs to see the small bonfires across the countryside. Even the shepherds in their mountain bories will have their little flames, and all of Provence will feel the healing time together.