by Don Wallace
Teeth in, the little lady chirped excitedly, eyes bright. She was the oldest person I had ever seen by a wide margin; also, probably the smallest. The bedding inside the armoire was fluffed around her like cotton wool in a cardboard box. We stood to pay our respects; when the chirping bird held out her hands, Mindy took them and then gently covered them with hers to warm them. The smell of ammonia returned, stronger.
Another quarter hour passed before Madame Morgane made a suggestion that perhaps it was time for bed. After all, the cows were already asleep. To the tiny bird in her box, she suggested that perhaps we would come by earlier tomorrow.
Bien sûr, Mindy said in a tone of pure affection, as if addressing a porcelain angel whom the slightest off-note might crack.
Only at the end, after Mère Morgane was tucked back into her lit clos, closed bed, did Mindy allude to the reason we’d come: to get more eggs. An offhand gesture toward me provoked Madame’s first laugh, a gruff bite of air. I knew the crushed eggs in my backpack would be the talk of the village tomorrow. Thus is fame distributed by the gods.
Madame went to a shelf and returned with a stub of butter, and discussed price with an unembarrassed air. We said our good nights. Walking back to the house in darkness unbroken except by stars and the periodic sweep of lighthouse beams, Mindy filled me in: Madame had no more eggs today but would check tomorrow. Some of the hens were playing games with her, hiding their output. Well, she’d show them! And butter, we could have a bit now and then. But no milk—it all went into the steel cans and was taken away by the cooperative.
“Thank god,” Mindy added. “I don’t think I could drink unpasteurized.”
One other thing: “The old man? The reason he didn’t speak for so long is because he thought you were a German.”
“I guess they have bad memories here, too.” In the country we’d found the war still fresh in the minds of the French.
“Actually? I think he thought the Germans were back.”
I paused to consider what that must’ve felt like. Was this how the war years had gone, a rap on the door, soldiers dropping in unannounced to buy—or, more probably, to confiscate—eggs and butter? Had they stayed, chatting up the women? What else had they done? Was that why the little bird lady had stayed so quiet in her nest in the armoire?
“Well, that explains his expression,” I said, shivering a bit. It was cold tonight. But not as cold as that first few minutes with the old man.
Two minutes later, we’d arrived at Gwened’s house. Taking a last look at the night sky and its fast-moving clouds, we rattled the door latch, ducked our heads, and stepped inside. Without a word, Mindy took a black cast-iron frying pan off its hook on the wall. I opened the small refrigerator. Then we set about making dinner: an omelet for two, made with one egg.
• • •
Not a terribly auspicious beginning to our first stay in the village. Yet, during the next three months, our across-the-lane salutations and across-the-field waves morphed into longer chats. Soon, hardly a day would go by without a visit to Madame Morgane’s home. It was from her that we learned the truth about villages: that they are about multiple encounters with the same people every day.
Everything else is of secondary importance to running into each other here, there, here again, there again—a dozen times a day—and that doesn’t count the peering, the glancing, the double-taking, and even the spying out of windows, doorways, barn doors, cattle stalls, hedgerows, and lanes.
All of which is to say that it felt a bit wrong to bike on with Gwened and Mindy, leaving Madame Morgane in the dust of our clunky three-speeds. We should’ve dropped everything, even a trip to the beach, to pay our respects. But Gwened undoubtedly knew best.
Any regrets about Madame Morgane evaporated once our bikes crested the slight hill outside Kerbordardoué and we saw the island’s tabletop plateau glowing golden in the full blaze of late summer. Paradise! We’d never seen Belle Île like this. We’d never even imagined it like this.
Where the road diverged north-south, Gwened surprised us by turning away from the beach route. “Aren’t we going to Donnant?” Mindy called.
“Too many tourists! It’s terrible, the crowds! All noise and smells!” She picked up the pace. “Donnant is horrible! You must never go there, except in winter!”
Pedaling on behind her, Mindy and I exchanged a sorrowing glance. Ever since our first visit, we’d dreamed of Donnant’s long, empty curving beach. For years we’d talked about going for a swim there, but because it was always winter or early spring on our ensuing visits, the notion remained strictly theoretical. We were water people and we had high hopes, stoked five years ago by Mindy’s exclamation at watching wave after glassy wave come crashing down with the zippering finality of a North Shore tube: “Man, these are intense! They remind me of Pupukea. You know, I think they’re surfable!”
The island had a hundred other beaches, including a nice, small cove half a mile from Donnant. But Gwened took us along the central plateau, then down a valley, up the other side, and into a net of continually branching lanes. Passing by fields and stands of trees, we found it beautiful and tranquil except at one place, a crossroads, where we were rudely introduced to the concept of tourist traffic by a pack of speeding Peugeots and Renaults and Citroëns swaying as they zoomed around us, beeping their tinny horns. Back into the lanes we dodged, threading the stone-walled alleys of several small villages with names like Goelan, Bangor, Kervilahouen, Calastren, Herlin… Where were we going?
Finally Gwened stopped. Propping our bikes in a ditch where a newly threshed field ended at one of Belle Île’s jagged cliffs, we scrambled down a gully and along thin terraces of blue-green schist until we could drop onto the sand. After spreading out our towels in a rocky nook, Mindy and I walked down to the sea and, for the first time ever on our island, wet our feet.
A surge of foam sluiced around our ankles. We jumped back. Brrrr… It wasn’t warm, that’s for sure, even in the summer heat. We expected that mentally—the island was on a latitude with Labrador, after all—but the reality was tough to swallow. A second surge of icy water slithered up. I stood my ground as Mindy, the Hawaiian, retreated.
“It’s the same temp as California,” I coaxed.
“Southern?”
“Northern. Like Santa Cruz,” where I’d gone to college. Which was an acknowledgment that it was damn cold, in the very low sixties Fahrenheit. But, by taking a deep breath and gritting our teeth, it was within our capability to withstand and maybe even enjoy.
Like astronauts testing the atmosphere on a new planet, we waded in, shuddering, yelping. At last we were in up to our necks, finning. Gasping at the cold. The icy fire of the sea contrasted with the blazing sun overhead, sending conflicting alarms to my nervous system. The mirror-bright glints of sun on the surface already had me squinting when, rotating around to get a 360-degree view, I saw a backlit female form walking sinuously down the sand toward the water’s edge. Voluptuous as a goddess, she carried herself with the unself-conscious pride of naked Aphrodite popping out of her scallop shell and traipsing through pink sea foam.
“Um…Mindy?”
“I’m seeing it.”
Parting the waves and breaststroking toward us was her old professor, our mentor, muse, and now inspiration in her altogether, Gwened Guedel. What a different Belle Île this was turning out to be. We’d never seen a summer on Belle Île, never felt its heat; we’d never even seen a swimmer, certainly not a nude one. And now: Gwened Godiva.
Of course, we weren’t that shocked. Not us. Nudism was fine by us, only bothersome because there was an obligation to participate or else be thought bad-mannered or, worse, prudish. But the contrast between this nymph and Gwened—the formerly buttoned-up defender of culture, taste, and grammar—was jarring.
Back on the sand after a frigid ten minutes, we retained our swimsuits, though Mindy set aside her top
in sisterly solidarity. Slowly the sun warmed us, a different sun than ours back home, a northern sun. It actually made me want to take my clothes off a little, like a Swede, maybe.
“Don? Mindy?” asked Gwened.
Something about her tone suddenly put me on guard. With nudists in California, particularly those of the hot tub variety, there occasionally comes a delicate moment when someone asks The Question, usually after you’ve been dodging their foot caresses under cover of dark water. I prayed this wasn’t about to be our moment with Gwened. But she was a college professor, and life among the professors of California and Iowa had acquainted me with much that, in retrospect, had little to do with book learning.
“Hrrruummm….aoooo…” Mindy was pretending to be asleep, the coward.
“Oui, Gwened?” Cringing inwardly at what was to come, I reminded myself not to be flip. Whatever she found comforting, given her cancer, I’d try to understand.
“Have you given any thought to your fosse septique?”
Our septic tank? God bless the French! From what I’d learned in May, when I’d come out to inspect the house and make the big decision, few things come closer to the heart in France than a discussion of one’s plumbing.
As proof of this hypothesis, Mindy suddenly opened one eye and inquired, in a sepulchral tone: “What about it?” With that, the two topless demoiselles launched a discussion that would doubtless have deflated the erotic aspirations of any eavesdropping nudist or voyeur.
• • •
While Denis LeReveur was off drawing plans and canvassing contractors for bids, we adopted Gwened’s schedule. After her early morning meditation, we’d go off on a cycle or walk; picnic at a beach or cove or valley; stop off in the nearest town, Sauzon, to see what kind of fish the boat had brought in; do a little gardening or some household chores; take an afternoon siesta, pick vegetables from the garden, eat a light supper, and then head back out into the endless evening.
We respected her new regimen: no coffee, few fats, no beef, lots of organic produce. Though it made me light-headed, we even followed her calorie-restricted diet (long before that term was popularized). She explained—the only time she dwelt on her illness—that she’d rejected a radical mastectomy. She just couldn’t do it. En France, les seins sont sacrés. And so, instead, she was trying to starve the cancer.
After the excitement of the first couple of days of our visit, however, Gwened became melancholy. Her eyelids seemed heavy, her smile triste. But she held it in or else talked about her son, Daniel—his talent, his potential. He wasn’t a good fit in the rigid French education system; his college studies weren’t going well. Perhaps she would send him to a school in the States. She spoke wistfully of our mentoring him. Could we do that? Did we find the life of a writer satisfying? It was so hard to break through in France. It must be so much easier to be a writer in America.
We answered as best we could, conscious that our goal was to give hope to Gwened, not actionable suggestions. It was a bit of a joke, having to pretend to be successful. Mostly, the talk about Daniel only made his absence all the more glaring. Where was he? His college in Paris wasn’t more than four hours away. Not that we minded being here for Gwened, but it was a heavy burden to bear, and we weren’t family, exactly. If either of our mothers had been diagnosed and gone through treatment and then refused surgery, preferring to self-medicate and thus raise the odds against making it, wouldn’t we have come home for the summer?
Finally we slipped away to have coffee and discuss this and other matters with our neighbors, Franck and Ines, who were renovating their own shambling collection of sheds and huts across the lane from us. They exchanged glances. With exquisite silences between arduously chosen words, they hinted that there had been a kind of rupture.
The breakup between Gwened and her husband had hit Daniel hard. He’d chosen to take his father’s side, perhaps because he feared he’d be losing his mother, anyway. Anger for teenagers is often the only accessible emotion, Ines said. But here, anger was inflicting a deep wound on top of Gwened’s cancer.
Accepting the difficult situation for what it was, we sighed and agreed that the best thing we could do for Gwened was to simply follow her lead and support her wherever we could. Teaching was her profession; lecturing came naturally. So we started asking questions. We had a beginner’s grasp of island culture and history. But, we asked, could she tell us more? Gwened had a theatrical streak, and once she got started quilting together bits and pieces of Bellilois history, she always seemed to grow happier, especially when unveiling like a stage magician some secret island grotto or describing an obscure island custom.
She also revealed her evolving spiritual life. She’d become a Buddhist, she explained, but had not left the Church, even with the divorce. (God and the French having long had an understanding that the soul is too precious to be wasted on dogma.) Naturally, she couldn’t resist instructing us, minute by minute, on the intentionality of our every act. We listened respectfully. After all, we were certifiably crazy, too—and had a deed to a ruin to prove it.
We could feel the spiritual and physical halves of Belle Île converging in many places—at a crossroads marked by a fourteenth-century stone cross, at a turning where two massive standing stones kept watch like Celtic sentinels, down inside any of the grottos of the Côte Sauvage. But Gwened helped us see something closer to home when she walked us through her house and pointed out the basics of a Breton maison saine: a front door that opened directly into a combined kitchen and common area, centered between stove and fireplace; a long rectangular table with bench seats perpendicular to the door; and a couple of armoires at opposite ends, one for dishes and the other for linens. You drank water or cider from brown clay bowls and ate galettes and crêpes off brown plates. The delicate white-and-yellow-trimmed Quimper platters stayed in the armoire, on display, except for rare occasions.
It was a pared-down life, organized around working the family farm, but one that always set a place for beauty. Whether breakfast, lunch, tea, or supper, once everything was washed up and put away, a piece of hand-knit lace was placed on the table and, upon it, a pitcher or bowl with a flower arrangement, inevitably incorporating a large, pale lavender blossom snipped from one’s own hydrangea by the front door.
A maison saine made sense. If you were going to live in two or three rooms, as many Breton families did, you’d need a house that facilitated cooking and cleaning and chores. You’d also want it to make an orderly and attractive first impression, one not overcluttered or fussily decorated or unduly idiosyncratic. So, no tchotchkes or geegaws. As a point of pride, a maison saine had to look welcoming from the get-go—to reflect its occupant’s readiness to offer a seat, a cup of coffee, and a slice of buttery kouign amann to anyone who happened to drop by.
Disregarding any guilty thoughts about our messy, slightly desperate life back in New York City, we assured Gwened that this was our goal, too. We, too, wanted sanity and promised to create it in our house. But if we thought that would placate her, we were mistaken. Because she was intent on giving us a sentimental education of another order: the basics of a moral house.
For a house to be moral it had to belong; it had to be right. And for a house to be right, it had to know its place, which by Gwened’s lights meant putting the character and beauty of the village and island above any and all personal claims and architectural pretensions. This was what underlay her anxieties about our roofline, our upstairs windows, our red tiles…and our fosse septique. This was the real and true Way of the Island, one we had yet to show that we understood.
Chapter Eight
French Regulatory Style
To a couple of kids raised on the melodramatic landscapes of Hawaii and California, Belle Île was as subtle as an exhalation of wild rosemary after a summer rain, a tone poem of open fields, cypress windbreaks, and neatly clustered villages, all encircled by a fractal fringe of coves, cliffs, and be
aches. In place of a grand operatic showstopper, a Mauna Kea or a Yosemite or a Golden Gate Bridge, it offered a little melody that you couldn’t get out of your head.
Another thing the island didn’t offer was big-city action or Côte D’Azur glitz. Maybe the two-thousand-plus year-round residents of Le Palais thought they were the cat’s pajamas, living in the shadow of the looming ramparts of its seventeenth-century fortress, the Citadelle Vauban. But the most impressive, pervasive, and surprising thing about Belle Île was an absence, one that we noticed and reregistered every single day: there were no tourist villas jammed up to the edge of the coast and no cookie-cutter developments, unlike everywhere else we’d been in the developed world, whether in Crete, Santorini, Hawaii, Long Island, or California.
Right up to the moment we’d initiated the buying process, we’d assumed this was a magical accident, that people just loved Belle Île too much to despoil it. But first Sylvie, our Breton lawyer, and then Gwened, our one-stop mentor and architectural muse, had set us straight. There was no invisible hand to preserve the island. But there was an iron one: government regulations enforced by local zoning.
The coast was off-limits; building was kept within village borders; and since 1765, almost every new house in the one hundred fifty-two villages had turned out white-walled, slate-roofed, and designed to the same floor plan. The rare exceptions predated the regulations—such as the elegantly skinny, early-eigthteenth-century townhouses crammed in along the quays of Le Palais and Sauzon—or else were one of the island’s three large hotels. Brazen yet low-rise, these were tucked away and out of sight, unlike those in Mindy’s flashy Waikiki.