by Don Wallace
Great.
Gwened stirred. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
I shrugged but, finding myself unable to snub the possibly dying, soon-to-be divorced fairy godmother beside me, I rummaged in my New Age bag for something to say. “No. But I’ve had some pretty powerful moments of déjà vu.”
Gwened got up, brushing the sand from her legs. “You must tell me about them someday. I’m going back up to the house to meditate.” I started to rise. “No, stay. I think you should watch the sun go down over Donnant on your first night as a propriétaire. Enjoy.”
She smiled, turned, and trudged off up the sand dune like some Bedouin sage in a purple glen-plaid caftan. Not for the first time, she had guessed right; I did want to be alone with my beach and my thoughts. Not a few of which concern you, Gwened, you and your mysterious decision to lure us into exile.
That night we held a celebration dinner. It was quite a contrast to my first meal in a French home, one Sunday at Gwened’s years ago. Then she’d impressed me with how closely elegance was allied with austerity: a bowl of yellow squash soup silky with butterfat, a gratiné of potatoes layered in Gruyere and Parmesan, a single slice of the home-cured ham that hung in her attic, followed by a salad of bitter greens, and particularly revelatory for me, a piece of ripe fruit for dessert. That meal had been a demonstration of how the quality of ingredients could carry the day.
This meal tonight, on the other hand, seemed designed for a hunger strike. After the fresh tomato soup, Gwened served each plate with a tiny mound of rice, a slice of steamed squash, fresh grated carrots, and a half-dozen miniature Brussels sprouts. I didn’t know which was more amazing to me, the fact that Franck and Ines’s children tucked in without comment or that Franck and Ines kept on exclaiming with wonder over their food—for it was plain, the plainest food I have ever eaten in France: unseasoned, unbuttered, almost uncooked.
Years ago, when I had returned to California after my first visit to France, the first thing I’d done was to make a beeline for the supermarket and buy things I’d spent a lifetime avoiding, butter in particular, but cream and veal as well. To me, France was richness. Tonight wasn’t France; tonight was ridiculous.
“Tout directement du jardin!” said Gwened triumphantly. “Tout biologique!”
“S’a goût extraordinaire,” said Ines.
“Superbe,” said Franck. “Tout biologique!”
Okay, I got it, I got it: the vegetables were out of the garden and organic. But I don’t think I will ever understand how they managed to drag that meal out for twenty minutes, let alone an hour. To keep pace, I had to eat my rice a grain at a time. As for the conversation, once Gwened’s forte and a demanding steeplechase of current events and literary aphorisms, it limped.
Shyly, Ines looked up at Gwened. “May I meditate with you tomorrow morning?”
“Of course.”
The children grinned at their mother as if she’d scored tickets to the zoo. I glanced at Franck, expecting to see the beginnings of a wisecrack take form on his lips. But no, he was nodding, too.
Everyone’s turned into vegetables, I thought. It’s like The Stepford Wives. You really don’t have a clue about what you’re getting into, do you? How much will you dare tell Mindy?
• • •
What did Mindy know? I’d tried telling her countless times about Gwened, about the condition of the house, but it was as if she didn’t want to hear it. But even now, standing in the square before an awfully decrepit ruin, I couldn’t get a read on her thoughts. Which was rare for her and rough for me. I couldn’t say whether she’d figured out yet the magnitude of mess we were in, whether she somehow approved of it, or whether she was just making the best of it. Maybe she was just biding her time before laying into me in private. I’d deserve it. But I needed to know. The suspense was killing me.
Just as I was about to launch into a mea culpa, Gwened turned sharply away. The grinding of gears came from down the lane, and a moment later the dull nose of a weathered Citroën truck appeared. It swung toward us, squeezing slowly between hydrangeas, rocking in the deep ruts. Behind the wheel: Denny the Dreamer. Who turned out to be tall and serious, with rimless glasses and a rumpled, handsome face.
In jeans and a thick sweater jacket open to a chambray shirt, he could’ve passed for a modern English country squire, the kind who drives a Land Rover in London. I could see where Gwened’s description of him as a local rake and wild boy came from. But he’d married and settled down, she’d said, and was the only Bellilois who was certified as a maître d’oeuvre en bâtiment, or master builder.
As we shook hands, Denis LeReveur seemed relieved to understand Mindy’s French. My mangled phrases he greeted with solemn nods. But when it came time for him to shake hands with Franck, I noticed an immediate chill. We’d heard Franck say that the locals did not take kindly to newcomers who came to seek work. As an unlicensed carpenter, even if only doing pickup jobs to feed his family, Franck posed a real threat to some Bellilois somewhere.
Once Franck took the hint and withdrew, gracefully, LeReveur became more relaxed. And Gwened took charge, by prearrangement. “Mindy and Don would like your opinion as to how much work the house requires this winter,” she said, “and how much can be postponed. Would you care to go inside?”
LeReveur gave us both a serious and apologetic look before replying, his manner like that of a doctor in a waiting room who has come to tell the relatives the dire condition of a patient. “I’ve already been inside, this morning,” he said in French that Mindy rapidly translated under her breath, as she usually did for me. He shrugged. “C’est total. Le toit, le fond, le bois, les planche—tout est foutu.” His long face lengthened as he peered over his rimless glasses to convey his deepest sympathy.
This time Mindy’s sharp intake of breath was not asthma. “Merde!”
Gwened flinched in disapproval. LeReveur nodded.
“It really is not possible to postpone the work?”
LeReveur gave a slow shake of his head. Pointing to the slumping roofline, he cupped both hands to illustrate the walls, then opened them suddenly. He puffed out his cheeks and blew: Poof! Nodding at the jumbled stones and collapsed walls down at the end of the lane, a ruin I admired for its picturesque qualities, he said something that Mindy did not need to translate: by next spring we’d be the proud owners of a rock pile just like that one.
Mindy and I looked at each other. All I could think of was our bank balance of a few hundred dollars. This was quickly followed by wondering if there were any contests left that we hadn’t entered.
But I knew it was hopeless. This was one hole no number of door prizes could fill.
• • •
A small house in France. That’s what we wanted.
But what did Gwened want from us?
Later—after weighing everything, years into this life-changing detour—I wondered if she’d had an atavistic calling. Maybe cutting her hair short had sparked it, reminded her of Joan of Arc rallying her army of believers. Perhaps chemotherapy woke something in the blood that told her it was her destiny to be the mystic center of a village where endless summer evenings edged into Celtic twilight and lives were performed on an ageless stage.
Was Gwened acting as a casting director for her own vanity production, Prospero of a Breton Brigadoon, without thought for how it might work out for us? In the beginning, yes. Magical thinking was involved, maybe narcissism. But there was always something hardheaded in Gwened’s calculations. In an angle we didn’t figure out for nearly thirty years, she seemed to have been stocking up, preparing for changes not just in her own circumstances, but for a village life after death.
One suspicion did actually occur to us very early on, if too late to prevent the fate that would befall us: that the whole thing turned on a misunderstanding. Gwened assumed we were rich. As a little girl in the summer of ’44, she’d seen
Americans riding to the rescue on their Shermans, handing out C-rations and chocolate. Maybe she hoped the cavalry would come again. Save Kerbordardoué, and then gracefully withdraw.
What Gwened couldn’t know was the supreme effort it had taken us to get this far, to scratch out our meager living in Manhattan. Our housing situation at the time, for instance, was laughably precarious and illegal. If we lost it, we’d lose our toehold in the city. Everything in New York was such a struggle: finding an apartment, jobs, a place to do the laundry where it wouldn’t be stolen from the dryer. We lived on pizza slices and seltzer. More to the point, when considering a house abroad: under America’s neo-Calvinist office rules, I was eligible for a whole five days off a year, plus two sick days to be taken at the discretion of my employer. Assuming we still wanted to see our families on the West Coast and Honolulu at least once a year—and we certainly did—when exactly would we be able to go to France?
Maybe Gwened couldn’t imagine us poor and vacationless because she’d taught at Stanford’s college-abroad program for over a decade. In her eyes, “Young Americans”—cue the David Bowie song—had trivialized their legacy in France. We drank a lot, didn’t learn the language, and pined for a decent hamburger while desecrating the world’s finest cuisine with squiggles of ketchup. Although at times we exhibited hints of the vigor, virtue, and élan of the New World, overall we children of the liberators of ’44 disappointed her.
This made her faith in us all the more touching, if a little misplaced. As a student, Mindy had absolutely memorized the address of the only restaurant in Tours that served a hamburger (with ketchup, too, the genuine Heinz). Gwened never knew.
And so Gwened sounded her horn, like Roland in the wilderness, in all hopefulness. Would we answer the call? Having seen Kerbordardoué, how could we say no?
No matter how cloudy her motives, Gwened’s pitch was explicit in one other point: she was quite serious that we would be helping to rescue the village. We’d known Kerbordardoué when it was still a working village, meaning it hadn’t gone over to the dark side—to tourism. But the change everyone dreaded was coming fast. The last herd of cows had been sold; the last farmer had rented out her fields.
We could help keep the village’s soul intact, she explained in one of her letters. Too many outsiders were coming to the island, sniffing around for bargains. An empty house in the center of the village in the wrong hands could spell the end of Kerbordardoué. And guess what? she added, concluding that fateful first letter with a flourish. The villagers took a vote on it. They want you, not some stranger, not another German.
So Gwened said, and so we believed.
They want us?
In hindsight, we didn’t stand a chance.
Chapter Five
At Home Abroad: Four Easy Lists
1. What a House Needs
•4 chairs
•Table
•Bed
•Sheets (?)
•Spoons, forks, knives
—Don, Year Two
2. Always Bring
•Louisiana Hot Sauce
•Curry powder
•Swim fins
•Swim eardrops
•Books in English
•Itty Bitty Book Light (2) & batteries
•Mosquito repellent
•Hair dryer (?)
•Scotch
—Don, Year Five
3. Always Bring, Updated
•Surfboard
•Wet suit
•WARMER sweaters
•Books IN ENGLISH
•Mosquito netting
•Monopoly, chess set
•Wiffle ball and bat
•Frisbee
•Nerf football
•Tennis rackets
•Golf clubs
•CD player
•CDs
•Power converter (very important)
•Hair dryer (!)
—Don, Year Eight
4. Bring
•Gifts for children:
–Hawaii stickers, charms, etc.
•Gifts for surf gang:
–Local Motion T-shirts, bumper stickers
•Gifts, adults: New York souvenir stuff
•Suzanne: Scarf
•Madame Morgane: Scarf
•Gwened: Hawaii shell necklace
•Surf booties and cold-water surf wax
—Mindy, Year Seventeen
Chapter Six
Summer Plans
Following our on-site disaster inspection with Denis LeReveur, we sat around Gwened’s patio table and had a needed drink. Gwened didn’t serve the hard stuff, but even a Kir Royale at this point was a godsend. As we nibbled olives, LeReveur unveiled the process he would undertake on our behalf, as mâitre d’oeuvres en bâtiment. First, he would prepare a series of plans, architectural renderings that he would submit for approval to the Mairie du Sauzon, the mayoral office of our district.
Assuming eventual approval, he’d also start collecting bids from subcontractors and tradesmen. These would be collected in one sheaf, called the devis, pronounced “day-vee.” We would sit down with him, go over the individual projects and their cost projections, make modifications, choose grades of materials, and okay specifications. Once a complete document was approved, we’d sign. At that point, the contract for all the work and costs would be legally binding. Did we understand?
Yes.
Did we really understand? We nodded.
LeReveur looked to Gwened.
“This means,” Gwened said in her precise English, “that you will be responsible for payment no matter what. France has a different legal code than the United States, as Mindy knows. If you do not pay, you will be presumed guilty and may go to jail before your case is heard.”
Ah, the famous Code Napoléon. As a law student, Mindy had always enjoyed discussions of the Emperor’s reforms to centuries of feudal customs. The Code’s most famous divergence from Anglo-American law was the rejection of a presumption of innocence as well as habeus corpus. As Gwened said, once arrested you could be thrown in jail until trial, without appeal. This had always sent a delicious chill down Mindy’s spine. She’d just never imagined it might apply to us.
“But for now you sign nothing,” Gwened continued, still in English. “Denis is happy to prepare the devis, but he will have to act fast to get it to you before you leave.” She bestowed her gracious smile on him as he listened—attentive but helpless. Like me in the notary’s office when we finalized the deal, I realized, he was basically at the mercy of Gwened’s translation. However, it occurred to me that Denis didn’t need the broadax of the Code Napoléon poised over our heads. He had something better: Gwened’s disapproval would keep us in line.
“Now, Denis, I have a question for you.” Speaking French, Gwened pivoted as deftly as a prosecutor grilling a surprise witness. “Don and Mindy want a maison saine.”
Denis LeReveur nodded. “Oui, une maison saine, c’est bonne.”
I stared at them in confusion. Were they really saying we wanted a “sane house”? What was this, a commentary on our state of mind? Or was it a Freudian slip in translation? None of the above, Mindy explained. Saine meant healthy, only not quite the way we meant healthy. More like spiritual health. Or, yeah, mental health. Just not crazy mental health.
The conversation turned even more arcane when Gwened turned to Denis. “Don and Mindy will want two bedrooms upstairs. Are you going to observe the Golden Mean?”
Denis nodded. “Of course, the house will be in proportion.”
“So this means you will not raise their roofline higher than the neighbor’s. Correct?”
Mindy shot me a surprised glance. The bedrooms were a given; we’d discussed them with Gwened, but this was the first we’d heard about the r
oofline or the Golden Mean. I knew what Mindy was thinking. We might have to be careful that Gwened didn’t take too firm a hand on the tiller. It was our house, after all. And our money. All our money—that we didn’t have.
Denis tried to be diplomatic: “The roofline could be higher, but, of course, it would not look as nice. But if it is not raised, then the chambers will not be as tall.”
To me, this sounded as if Denis was signaling to us that not only could we have a taller roof, but we should. Our roof would simply jump a few feet taller. Our neighbor—who didn’t live in the house, and whom we’d never met—would learn to live with it. He had to: we shared a wall.
Mindy must’ve had the same idea, because she leaned forward eagerly. “Well, if you really think the chambers would be too small…”
Gwened put down the hammer like an auctioneer: “It must be the same height as the neighbor’s. Because we must preserve the proportions, and because the neighbor would never forgive Don and Mindy and might even petition the Mairie of Sauzon, who might find it better for the roof to be lowered, which would be terribly expensive. Right, Don and Mindy?”
Gwened’s sudden vehemence made cowards of us all. We nodded, visions of crouching around and banging our noggins in a low-ceilinged bedroom running through our soon-to-be-bruised heads.
Now Denis looked relieved. Had he been hiding his misgivings about raising the roofline? Perhaps. Not an easy man to read, that Denis LeReveur.
The next subject was windows for the upstairs bedrooms, about which Gwened also had definite ideas. “The window cannot be too large, if it is flush to the roof.”
Denis nodded yes. “A large window flush is a bad idea. It will leak. It will compromise the integrity of the roof.”
“Then perhaps it’s better to only have a skylight.” When Gwened looked to us for assent, I realized she’d planned this, too. No windows in our bedroom, just a skylight sending down a dusty beam? At this rate, we’d be living in a crawl space with no light at all. As I took a deep shaky breath to voice my first-ever dissent to Gwened Guedel—knowing it could have untold consequences, none of them good—Mindy’s voice rang out: