The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All

by Don Wallace

  You want to get water going into the heater. To do this, peer behind the water tank—at the base near the wall you will see a black switch. Turn it parallel to the floor. You should hear a clunk. Note: do not touch the red faucet. Nobody knows what it does. We think it connects to the secret core of hot magma that lies under the island and, if thrown, will result in worldwide catastrophe.

  You will have hot water in about three to four hours. And it will be hot. Very! Be careful not to scald yourself. If there are many of you, take “shower-baths” with the telephone-shaped hand nozzle connected to the faucet by a hose. You will have noted the lack of a shower curtain, so do this while sitting in the tub, please. Otherwise, the water you spray all over the bathroom will most assuredly worm its way through a crack in the floorboards, collect on the ceiling below, and eventually land—plop!—on the dining table at the exact moment you have placed the salad, sole meunière, and lemon tart before your eager dinner guests.

  There is usually enough water in a tank for 3.5 good consecutive shower-baths at the end of the day, after the beach, when you really need it. The water reheats quickly, too. Still, whoever gets the 0.5 is going to feel shortchanged, so we find it helps to rotate “first bath”—as in, “David gets first bath tonight! Rory had it last night.” That way nobody gets frozen, and the inevitable bathroom hog can be taught moderation.

  (Attention, siblings, cousins, and parents of bathroom hogs: when you hear the bath taps running, you may find it desirable to start doing the dishes, using plenty of hot water.)

  4.Bathroom. Go upstairs to the bathroom. By the toilet you will see boxes of the septic tank chemical that will keep everything smelling sweet. Put two packets in the bowl and flush.

  Despite this, you may notice a sort of sickly odor that rises like a miasma at night when the entire village is humming behind closed doors and windows are fogged from all the shower-baths taken in succession. This odor should be ignored; taking notice of it will only encourage it.

  For Women Only: You will note that there is only one tiny mirror in the bathroom and no mirrors anywhere else in the house. This is deliberate and done for your own well-being. Of course, you can wash your face and comb your hair in the morning and after the beach, but other than that, we recommend cultivating the Belle Île look of bohemian-athletic-seaside dishevelment to go with that Coco Chanel suntan you’re working on. The same goes for clothes.

  You’re never going to surpass the Frenchwomen in Paris, but here everyone is taking a break from trying too hard. That resort thing you do—changing into a new outfit three times a day—can be safely retired until back on the Continent. And please, lose the heels. There’s a reason traditional Breton women wore wooden sabots. You don’t want to become mired in the mud by the stiletto heels of your Manolo Blahniks. It’s a style, this dishevelment: le sportif.

  Oh, Mindy says I’m out of my mind if I think Frenchwomen aren’t working it overtime. Well, I’ll be doggoned… Now she’s pointing out that she hasn’t forgotten the summer our neighbor the movie starlet threw her towel down next to mine, yanked off her punk rock T-shirt, and unveiled her nasty black bikini. Okay, okay—I didn’t realize what was going on until it was, you know, going on… (And I didn’t realize you were watching, honeybunch.)

  For Men Only: If you have any male children, it may be wise to have Daddy demonstrate how the toilet lid works, or fails to, if you’re attempting to take a whiz while standing up. Just when you least expect it—bang!—the lid falls like a guillotine.

  Don’t worry if you botch this demonstration. Even if your son starts wetting the bed because you nearly amputated your own unit, you’re in luck—not for nothing is Belle Île known as “the island of psychiatrists.” There are two in Kerbordardoué, another three in adjoining villages, and they all sit down at the beach together, which makes an informal consultation easy to arrange.

  5.Stove/Oven: France uses propane for cooking, which is interesting if you think of her distinguished pedigree for cuisine and how, in America, a propane tank is associated with backyard barbecue or football tailgating.

  Under the sink is a blue bottle with a round disk valve on top. Turn this all the way open. Wait a minute and turn on a burner and light a match to test it. Note: we turn off the blue gas bottle at night. (Just our neurotic American ways, I guess, but once you read about the oven you will understand.)

  Important oven note: sadly, the oven has become so unpredictable we have to say: try to avoid using it. The dials mean nothing, so you may think you have turned it off and it is merrily filling with gas.

  There’s a reason the knobs are unreliable. One afternoon our son Rory’s older cousin Devo filled the stove with gas before lighting the oven. The resulting explosion removed his eyebrows and budding soul patch. It also blew the knobs across the room. In his defense, Devo was only trying to improvise a puff pastry pizza that Rory had demanded.

  Rory knew how to work the stove but was too lazy to get up off le ef-ef (a shorthand we’ve adopted for the fucking fauteuil, which is a doll-sized sofa the boys fight over Every. Single. Day.). And so Rory dictated the correct instructions to Devo while lying on le ef-ef like some preteen Caligula, but he just happened to leave off the part about lighting the match immediately until a couple of minutes had elapsed.

  Mindy and I were, of course, then blamed by the kids for going out surfing and not cooking, as we were supposed to be doing, under the Universal Parental Penal Code. I think one knob is still embedded in the wall. The others dangle on the stove, looking deceptively functional.

  (Look, we’ve tried to get the oven fixed for three years now, but repairmen always seem to have other things on their mind—like the movie starlet, famous for assassinating tough guys while wearing shiny black vinyl culottes, who haunts the ghostly white château behind the village.)

  Oh, and the recipe for chorizo pizza using supermarket dough (not puff pastry—Devo was improvising) is in the knife drawer. The recipes for Mindy’s famous chocolate football and Madame Morgane’s crêpes are in the drawer with the tinfoil and the corkscrew. Note: the insufferably hot, jolting, rickety little train you took earlier today out to the tip of the peninsula to the ferry port? It’s called le tire-bouchon. The corkscrew. Clever, huh?

  There are no other recipes, no cookbook. Just buy good local ingredients and cook. Use butter with eggs and sole, olive oil with everything else, animal, vegetable, or mineral. And if someone drops a sack of fresh sardines off on the doorstep, don’t ask any questions—head straight for the barbecue.

  6.The fireplace: Works well. When we bought the place it was just about the only positive in the eyes of our neighbor Franck. Anyway, just keep fires small, especially at first, so the smoke has a chance to draw up the chimney and dry it out after the long winter. A fire after a day at the beach is a nice thing. Don’t be afraid to try it. Unlike propane, wood burns at a predictable and uneventful rate.

  P.S. The barbecue in the fireplace goes outside, to the right, where our house’s white wall meets the rough stone wall of the shed. That’s where we grill those sardines you found on the doorstep, as well as island lamb chops, striped bass, mackerel, merguez, and chipolata sausages, all summer long. You can do it, too!

  P.P.S. The bicycle in the chimney is also to be removed before starting any fires. If you can get the chain to stay on, feel free to ride it. Don’t ask why it’s there. That’s a story for another time.

  Attractive Hazards

  This is a wild and rugged island, and that is part of its allure. We’re not ’fraidy cats, but we do give a wide berth to certain places, situations, tides, and ocean conditions. That big, beautiful beach, for instance: Donnant has twenty-foot tides and, when a swell is running, pumps out epic surf that should only be tackled by experts—a child or weak swimmer may have trouble. People drown there. As for the giant, three-hundred-foot-deep sea cave on all the tourist maps, the Grotto of the Apothecary, i
t has earned its postcard reputation for the sublime—and for swallowing up a tourist or two every year.

  The moors are dense with gorse and thistles and can tear your ankles to shreds. Just like in The Hound of the Baskervilles, there are a couple of sinkholes, including one a hundred feet deep, Le Trou de Vazen. The cliffs on the Côte Sauvage are very steep and sharp. Because there are so many coves and grottos that beckon from above, it’s easy to imagine that you can just scramble down those rocky ribs and have a romantic picnic by yourselves. Well, some places you can, and some you can’t. So guard your children at the edges of the Côte Sauvage. And don’t lose your own good judgment in raptures over its dizzying overlooks; that’s a long drop at your feet.

  What other attractive hazards lie in store? Wives, you’ve picked up my hint about the movie starlet. Men, eyes front. Close that slack mouth and suck in that gut. Don’t offer her your domestic assistance. Gals? If you need to extract a little revenge, try a flirtation à la Française. They say Johnny Depp comes here and I’m sure his girlfriend will look the other way. (She’s French, isn’t she?) For romantic advice, you can ask that gypsy-looking woman who roams the village lanes at twilight, all aswirl in pastel veils like a senior citizen version of Stevie Nicks. She was the lover of Marlon Brando. Really.

  I also ought to mention the bulls. It seems that the farmers of France have gotten a bit competitive, or insecure, about their status and have started buying stud bulls instead of relying on l’insémination artificielle. The thing is, these same farmers can be a bit lax about keeping up their mildly electrified fences, which are often weak single-strand affairs charged by a car battery.

  I know this sounds far-fetched, but if a large snorting beast with sharp horns appears to be taking an active interest in you or your red windbreaker, as once happened to me, it may be wise to run away like a mo-fo while stripping off aforesaid windbreaker and throwing it over a bush as you leap into a deep ravine filled with thorny blackberry vines. I lived to tell the tale, and you might, too.

  • • •

  Let’s see—have I forgotten anything?

  Oh, yes… The lane above our house makes a left turn into a tunnel of trees and a leaf-strewn drive. As you walk up the lane between tall, gappy hedges, no doubt a bit bedazzled and jet-lagged, drawn by the sunset or, in the early morning, nudged gently by the shimmering warm palm of a rising sun at your back, be on the lookout for a red cord. If you should find your way blocked by such a red cord, stay put.

  Somewhere in your vicinity there is a Zen archer taking aim with her eleven-foot kyudo composite bow. She is dressed all in white, with a black sash and a red headband. She has been meditating for forty minutes on a single arrow. She does not see you or hear you; she only has eyes for the tiny, white paper bull’s-eye pinned up forty yards away.

  Wait.

  Wait.

  Wait for the thwack! of a hit. Or the whooshhhh of an arrow flying past.

  Then you may go. Don’t stop to introduce yourself. Gwened is in the midst of her war against cancer, and it is a very serious thing, literally a matter of life and death. She has one more arrow to draw and shoot on this day, your first in Kerbordardoué. Believe me, you don’t want to get in Gwened’s way.

  Emergencies

  Police. It is not strictly true that there are no police on Belle Île. In summer, two or three gendarmes are always zipping around the Le Palais roundabout in their blue Land Rovers, writing tickets and checking for pollution stickers and registrations. Do wear your seat belts—that’s a guaranteed write-up. There is no mercy in the Code Napoléon for seat-belt violations.

  There really is no need for police on Belle Île, since there is no crime. Okay, a sneak thief took my barbecue charcoal not once but twice a couple of summers ago. Now there’s an Agatha Christie plot!

  But real crime? Not much. Oh, of course we all have our stories of favorite murders, both solved and unsolved, but that’s storytelling and island gossip. (In particular, the rumor that tourists come here to murder their mothers is unproved. The legion of psychiatrists who summer on the island thinks it is more likely that the idea occurs after arrival, possibly after they’ve seen the menu at the witch’s hat château by the sea and realized they cannot both afford to order the lobster.)

  There is also an unseen but apparently very active smuggling network that uses go-fast boats running up and down the coast from Portugal to Cornwall, swapping loads of ecstasy, hashish, and cocaine while dropping off illegal immigrants from northern Africa. What I know about this, and how, is best saved for another occasion and told over a pint in a loud sailors’ bar down on the Le Palais waterfront. (After which, while staggering home, we shall disappear. Bystanders will hear a loud splash but see nothing, and our bodies will never be recovered.) So all in all, you won’t need the police. Ideally.

  Fire Department. If you have an emergency, on the other hand, call the fire department, or Les Pompiers. They do everything, including calling in the ER, the lifeguards, or the medivac helicopter. If someone blows up the house with the propane stove, falls in the well, breaks a leg, or gets trapped in a blackberry ravine, call Les Pompiers.

  Do I have their number? No. We don’t have a phone.

  About Phones. Remember, you came here to get away, but if you really need to make a call on your cell, you will have to drive or bicycle or walk back to the main road, position yourself by the two menhirs, standing stones from 3,500 BC, and shake your fist (holding your cell phone, of course) at the sky while cursing. This seems to work well enough for the Parisians.

  Oh, and remember to face east—not because of any mystical or religious reason, but because that’s where the nearest cell tower is.

  Medical. Docteur Pleybien, whom we have patronized in the main town, Le Palais, is a brisk and vibrant spirit with an intellectual and erotic appetite that may have been a little constrained by such a small island. I say this because, alas, she has packed it in to sail away on a fifty-five-foot sloop with a harem of potential boyfriends. I suspect she leaves behind a trail of broken hearts and wobbly marriages.

  Anyway, if you need to see a doctor, ask at the pharmacy in town. I think I can promise that you will find the French healthcare system a revelation.

  Oh, and if you need a psychiatrist? Just knock on any door in the village. Odds are you’ll find one. Or even better, find a villager just waiting to invite someone in for a coffee and a nice, long chat. This can be very soothing, even if you don’t speak French. I didn’t, not much, for a long time—and look at me now. Why, it’s easily been a couple of years since I’ve offered to cut off someone’s penis while under the impression that I was offering to mow their lawn…

  So, with all that said, welcome to Kerbordardoué, the most beautiful village on the magical island of Belle Île! Just don’t touch the red handle on the hot water heater.

  Chapter One

  Far Breton

  It’s another day in Kerbordardoué.

  Up at eight, before the others. The sun doesn’t set until nine thirty or ten during summer at this latitude, so it feels early. Treasuring the quiet, moving like a French Country Ninja, I put on the water, light the gas stove, quietly clean off the wineglasses, dessert plates, and empty bottles from last night. I ease open the window facing the dining table. A giant flowering bush pushes inside. It has to be pushed back outside every evening, like a last inebriated guest. I inhale herb-scented air, listen to the buzz of the bees. The square is empty, the village silent, the sky pink from sun diffused through a cottony marine haze.

  With a faint crunch of gravel underfoot, Suzanne strolls into view, hands clasped behind her back, trailed by a kitten. She’s in her usual blue apron over her usual blue-black shirtdress, the same outfit she’s worn every day for the last ten years, and probably every adult day of her life. The kitten dances with her heels and boxes the hem of her dress.

  Suzanne moseys over to the wel
l in the wall. Terraced sides of uneven stones form a veritable Hanging Garden of Babylon with the clippings she has inserted into the moist crevices. Her fingers fuss, tamping and fixing. She plucks a few live shoots to tuck into her apron pockets and transplant elsewhere. Then, hands clasped behind her back, she continues her promenade up the lane, past our door, eyes sweeping the flowers and shrubs along our thin verge of garden, most of which she’s planted and tended when we’re away, back in the States. If she were to raise her eyes, she’d see me. But like most older Bellilois, she tries not to look into windows or open doorways. Or at least if she does, to not get caught.

  A hiss from water spitting from the pot breaks the spell, sends me back to the stove. She probably knows I’m watching, anyway.

  Tap-tap-tap. Work has started somewhere. Peering out through the lace curtains on our door’s window, hand-knitted by Suzanne, I spot a close-cropped head rising above the tile roofline of the tall A-framed cowshed across the square. Rolling a dozen nails between his lips, Loup slides slates into place and tap-tap-taps. Another slate down, nine thousand to go.

  A well-muscled guy with a large tattoo of his German shepherd on his bicep, Loup is single-handedly rehabbing the long, narrow building. He’s restored the exterior walls to simple drystone glory, a seventeenth-century skill he had to teach himself. He’s ripped out the cow stalls and laid a floor of antique salvage oak, then an upper story where once swallows nested and shat. I’ve seen the future of the cowshed and it’s gorgeous: a building that sat ignored and decaying for forty years will soon be mistaken for an elegant village relic. Parisian women will set their snares for Loup, only to find themselves flustered and outsmarted by his first love, work. Meanwhile, one more blackened tooth in Kerbordardoué’s crooked smile will be restored.

  Clad in chic powder blue running togs, the blond wife of the Unforgiving Couple steps out into the square and does a quick set of bends and stretches. Fifteen years ago, the couple bought the empty lot across from us, a field of weeds spanned by rusted arches of iron that formerly supported the roof of a barn. Mindy and I took the loss of our view—a blue line of sea—stoically. One day the arches would be attractive hazards for our son and the village children, we thought.