by Don Wallace
We’re still uncertain about going to Belle Île when the August renters cancel at the last second. And that means Gwened is soon offering us her house at a reduced rate. Our Breton Brigadoon is pulling every string, working its magic, to reel us in. We scramble to buy tickets. We’re coming home.
Chapter Fourteen
Who Steals a Road?
Straight off the red eye from New York to Paris, we board the eight thirty a.m. train departing Gare Montparnasse for Rennes, where we will switch trains for one to Auray on the coast, where we will switch again to the Corkscrew to Quiberon, where we will catch the ferry Guerveur to Le Palais and then, at last, a taxi to our door.
We take turns nodding off while Rory gazes out the window at the slow-changing, eternal landscape of France, narrating the journey in a voice of bemused delight. “There’s a cow in a yard with his friend the dog. They live there with an old lady. There’s a bus. It’s not a big, fast bus like the ones on Belle Île, but a slow country bus…”
An elbow bites into my ribs and my eyelids roll up. Mindy nods at some people a few rows ahead. Sitting with his back to us is a man my age whose thick sweep of hair pulls back into a stubby ponytail. Mindy tugs my own stubby playfully. “Look…” she whispers. Bobbing above the seat, between the man and a pretty brunette, is the crown of a little blond head. “Our doubles,” says Mindy.
Three hours later, the train pulls into Rennes Gare. We have three minutes to pull down our bags and descend from the train, struggle down the quai, stumble down a long, slippery set of stairs into a tunnel under the tracks, then climb up another set of stairs to the quai’s other side, where the Auray train is waiting, chuffing impatiently. We vent curses and exhortations to each other and to Rory—“Move it!” “You move it!” Then we hear and see our doubles barking and stumbling ahead of us. Even in extremis it’s enough to make us smile.
On the Rennes–Auray leg we don’t see our doppelgängers. Napping hard, we awake in a couple of hours to find the red-tiled roof and pink stone walls of the cozy Gare D’Auray before us like a gateway to summer. Gone are the dark tunnels of Paris, the dank, wet black hills of Rennes. Sunlight blazes forth, Southern California strong. Heat washes over us as we sluggishly descend, slothlike mammals emerging from millennial hibernation.
On the swaying, creaking, stifling hot train we shed sweaters and jackets. So does everyone else. The seaside soon heaves into view and, boy, are we ready for it.
By the time the train is passing the beach, I’m down to my last layer of clothing, a classic French sailor’s blouse, horizontal blue-marine stripes on white, no collar. Rory is wearing an identical shirt. We must look cute, the way people are smiling at us. But maybe we’re too cute? Because now people are turning their heads, looking and laughing. Finally, on the off chance that it isn’t us they’re chortling over, we turn around and look behind, into the faces of our doubles, who are already giggling—because my ponytailed opposite is wearing an identical French sailor’s blouse and so is his son, Rory’s age. Mindy and her French counterpart break into laughter at what they’ve wrought, because, of course, they’ve dressed their men. The guy and I roll our eyes at having been had, again.
His name is Bruno, hers Valerie. The boy is Leo. And yes, they are going to Belle Île. It’s pointless to resist, and why would we want to try? We’ve doubled our summer family.
• • •
The first hours back in the village are spent in a jet-lagged daze under the long Nordic twilight, which goes on and on. We go for a walk, slipping past our house—we’ve agreed not to make a formal inspection until morning—but there’s no ignoring the drab exterior, unpainted walls, and rotted shutters charmlessly set off by foot-high weeds running the length of the front. We hurry on.
Still, New York falls away. Respiration and pulse slow; eyes widen, feeding on the dense, subtle tones. When a silhouetted figure across the close-cropped plateau appears, our first voisin of the summer, the light picks him and his three spaniels out like an engraving tool. Even at a half mile, he registers our gaze and lifts an arm. We do the same.
Rory narrates: “This is the ditch. It has water in it, very good for birds. A dog can drink it, too. Farther down there are sometimes cows.” At a bend in the road he stops and inhales and exhales rapidly, staring. It’s a landscape of stubble field and hay in round ricks called buttes, stretching away a couple of miles to the old moulin blanc on a hill. The mill’s vanes don’t turn anymore but it could be straight out of Cervantes.
Gwened’s house is nowhere near as airy as ours, if we could but live in it. It has that feeling you get in premodern houses, that the people who lived there were much smaller. We duck our heads to enter, duck the pots hanging from the beams, duck to take the stairs up to the bedrooms. I have to contract, bring my arms close to my ribs, to navigate the hallway. It’s appropriate that up here was where I read Gwened’s well-thumbed copies of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings during that first winter. By the time I’d finished those two thousand pages, I felt that I might very well be a hobbit.
Moving in slow motion, we make the beds and tuck Rory in and then ourselves. The room is dark and enclosed. We’ve forgotten that Gwened has no dormers, only skylights. It occurs to us that this is where her obsession with our windows comes from, not from some need for control. She only wanted us to live in a dark hobbit burrow like her own.
That first night’s sleep lasts, as always, well into the next afternoon. When we tumble downstairs we go straight outdoors to sit on the slate-topped stoop, joining the lizards basking there. Seeing them, Rory rises and with kung-fu stealth begins his annual stalk, the start of a twenty-one-day hunt; although who’s hunting whom is a good question as he falls headfirst into the bushes after an unsuccessful lunge.
Twenty-one days this year. Twenty-one days of light—versus three hundred forty-four of dark. That’s what it feels like.
Bowls of café au lait and chocolat chaud resting in our cupped hands, we begin to discuss what a perfect day might be like, today, and the day after that, and the one after that…
• • •
After coffee we’re ready to do our duty and inspect the house. The door groans open like a cliché. Inside all is dirt, windows obscured by huge spiderwebs clotted with hundreds of desiccated midges. We stand in a patch of dusty half-light, fighting the impulse to flee.
“Well…” says Mindy shakily.
“Yeah.” There’s no denying it. We made a mistake, buying this place. We’re poor. We live in a dark, two-room apartment in Manhattan, and for our one vacation we come—here?—to a dismal hovel in the mud and gloom? Nice change of pace.
I’m unable to meet Mindy’s eyes, afraid she’ll echo my thoughts out loud. Once spoken, the unraveling will begin. She sighs. “Looks like we got here just in time.”
We open doors and windows cautiously, letting in air, coughing, and wiping cobwebs on our hair, our pants. Upstairs we go, via our rude cowshed ladder, to a sense of relief, then quiet astonishment at how light, golden, and clean the rooms are. The workmanship matches the exquisite design: two large pyramid-shaped chambers completely paneled with sapin du nord, Swedish pine; the dormer windows two spacious coves in the ceiling; the windows large and commanding a roofline view of the square and our little allée, the lane, bursting with hydrangeas. We have gone up the beanstalk.
“Bonjour?” calls a voice below. We chorus back excitedly, expecting Suzanne, Franck and Ines, perhaps even Madame Morgane, but when we peer over the unguarded edge of the second floor we see two strangers, a man and a woman, dressed in crisp Parisian leisure wear, dark glasses in hand, standing on our ground floor without so much as a knock.
An echoing, overlapping, overloud conversation takes place, us up high, they below. It seems they have been waiting for us, driving by each day. But why? We don’t recall ever meeting them.
“But you’re not French,” she suddenly says.
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br /> “No, we’re not,” says Mindy.
“We thought you were workmen,” the man says, speaking slowly. “We will fix it up.”
“Fix it up? Are you workmen?” asks a bewildered Mindy. They rear back at the affront. The purpose of their visit becomes clear: they want to buy the house.
“But it’s not for sale,” I hear Mindy saying.
Their faces turn down with a prissy exasperation. Her voice is pure sneer: “This house is wasted on you.”
“It really isn’t for sale,” Mindy says firmly. “Now I must ask you to leave.”
“Ah!” Throwing her hands up, the woman cocks her head around her at the downstairs mess. “Enjoy your vacation!”
They go, taking with them our short-lived euphoria at how nice the second story looks. Now we are only aware of how far we have to go.
• • •
Riding on waves of jet lag, we crash into a second disappointment: Franck and Ines and their three children are nowhere to be seen, and what’s worse, there’s a new name daubed in white paint on their mailbox. They’ve moved? Can it really be true?
Suzanne confirms it. She doesn’t know the new people yet, news she conveys by blowing air out of her nostrils like a horse when we ask. As if, she’s saying, I have time to keep up with all the changes in this busy crossroads of the world! She doesn’t even know where Franck and Ines have gone. We hope their windsurfing school, always precarious because weather-dependent, hasn’t failed, forcing them off the island.
The next house over from Franck and Ines’s has new faces, too, but hasn’t changed hands. As sometimes happens on Belle Île, an island family has redistributed the real estate. This is how Bellilois hang on to their land. This is how Suzanne came to us after decades as a cowherd a few villages over; her little hovel had been waiting fifty years for her. After a succession of cousins or aunts or uncles (it was a granary for over a century) passed away, it came her way. Title doesn’t seem to change, and neither do the faces, bearing the same distinctive nose, the blue-black eye, the angular jaw, and other telltale signs of near-consanguineous island ties.
The new people don’t give us a second glance. That’s typical of first interactions (and second, and third) with villagers, we tell ourselves. Time is the only leveler. But it’s also true, of course, that these new people are the old people, the true îliens, islanders. After all, to them we are the new people, and always will be. Party crashers.
Mindy stands in the square, puzzled. She can’t quite put her finger on it, which bothers her.
But errands beckon. We’ve got Gwened’s old Renault 405, a luxury. It beats years past when we had to cycle into Sauzon for even the merest scrap of bread. Sauzon may be a picture-perfect little port with a perfect waterfront crêperie, Les Embruns, but for supply shopping it’s a hard slog by bike: twenty-five minutes to get there and more like forty minutes on the return, thanks to a long steep hill, hell when you’re wearing a backpack full of groceries.
Anyway, with the exception of the fish lady of Sauzon, who is not only charming and chatty but refuses to let pushy old ladies cut in line in front of foreigners, we won’t miss the vendors. What a crusty lot they are: the twin boulangerie ladies, grouches, sour from being shunned as collaborators after the war; the black-bearded butcher who talks of suicides he has known, whose final flights he commemorates in his scary oil paintings of vertiginous cliffs and the tourist-eating grotto; the frosty ladies at the small grocery, who aren’t so bad but have simply seen too many mosquito-bitten, hungover campers. Ah, but with a car…
Now we can go into Le Palais for the open market, which an hour-long bike ride each way put out of reach before. Roaming the stalls we select fresh fish, clams, vegetables, lettuces, local goat cheese, every purchase accompanied by a proper conversation.
On the way back we hit le supermarché on the hill. Okay, it’s a supermarket, but listen, they’re different in France. This one is the only place to get the freshest shrimp and sole, plus handmade buckwheat crêpes.
We can also buy sacks of potatoes and onions, grated Gruyère, sliced ham, yogurt, tubes of tomato sauce and merguez sausages from Algeria and the Moroccan hot sauce called harissa, rolls of paper towels, boxes of toilet paper, cases of Kronenbourg 1664 beer and cidre brut and bricks of UHT milk, not to mention good cheap coffee and chocolate and wine, including four-buck Muscadet and three-buck Gros Plant. With Gwened’s car, for the first time we can buy all this in one shopping trip instead of strung out over two weeks. It’s something we can’t do even in Manhattan, being carless. And so we go a little overboard.
The pleasure of having Gwened’s house to ourselves for the first time since 1980 is doubled when we catch sight of her vegetable patch: rows of runner beans, zucchini with bright yellow blossoms, tomatoes sagging from green vines, parsley, cabbages, carrots, frisée, and peppers. We have Gwened’s blessing to take all we want and give it away, too.
Finally there’s Gwened’s jardin. Her tree-shaded grassy lawn has a hammock and a pair of old wicker chairs, perfect for whiling away an afternoon reading. We’re set.
• • •
After our over-the-top shopping trips to town, we won’t need another for weeks. We can still zip into Le Palais or Sauzon to buy fresh fish, Brittany’s famous salt lamb, and baguettes, but to top off our staples there’s a Thursday panel truck that beeps its horn and opens its side to reveal a mini mobile grocery. The truck is where Suzanne and Madame Morgane shop, avoiding town as much as possible. Suzanne doesn’t even go to church, unlike Madame Morgane. She’s got her religion right here, growing and flowering all about her. We’ve all got it right here. There’s no greater glory than a day spent in Kerbordardoué.
But one day when the jet lag has fully worn off, Mindy again stops in the village square, frowning and looking around. “Something’s changed,” she says. Just then the sound of a car makes us look down our allée, our one-lane road. The car turns up the tilted track and trundles toward us, wobbling from side to side in the ruts and potholes. We step aside to let it head off to the left, to the last cluster of houses. But it doesn’t turn and we have to step aside again, backs against our wall. As it passes the occupants stare straight ahead with that eyes-front expression particular to Bretons from the Continent.
The car goes past our house, headed for a dead end. Suddenly it cuts around our north wall and rumbles away into Madame Morgane’s barnyard. We follow. And watch as the passengers get out—elderly, tiny, the two women in proper woolen jackets—and go in the front door of a blinding white, brand-new, prefab-looking version of a classic Belle Île house.
“Oh my god,” says Mindy. “A tourist villa! Where did that come from?”
We study it for several minutes, commenting to ourselves, the no-peeking village rule suspended by disbelief. The front door opens and the people, two couples, come out again and get into the car. The engine starts. There’s a gravel driveway in front of them leading to the main road, but they slowly reverse in the barnyard, turn around, and head out. We pull back and stand in our doorway as they drive by, only inches from our doorstep, with that same impassive—or is it gloating?—look.
“Why are they using our lane?” Mindy’s expression is granitic. “They came much too close to the house. They could hit Rory. They should take the road…” She looks around. Her eyes narrow. “Wait a minute—where is the road?”
The main road into the upper village and our square, the old threshing ground, is wider than our allée and doesn’t squeeze between stone walls. Or was wider, because it’s gone. In its place a thick, tall hedge blocks our view and indeed makes even the idea of a road a spurious fabrication by foreigners. We walk over and feel stupid. How can you not notice a missing road for three days? Well, we have been gone two years.
And this is a professional job: a landscaped berm, then a row of large terra-cotta pots holding flowers and tomato vines, then the wall of shr
ubs.
“How could they let this happen?” says Mindy, running down the names of neighbors in her head while I do the same out loud: “Gwened? Franck and Ines? Suzanne? Madame Morgane?”
We descend our lane to the road and follow that around the corner and up to the houses that formerly bordered the now-not road. On the other side of those heavy shrubs is a picnic table, a homemade brick barbecue, and a white wrought iron patio table with matching chairs. Both sets of new neighbors seem to have collaborated, as a second row of shrubs, these immature, set off a similar patio at the house opposite. They’ve divided the road down the middle.
That evening we go to talk to our new neighbors. They come from the suburbs of Paris. Their friendliness seems sincere. Mindy drops a few hints. Oh, I see you have a nice patio. Yes, isn’t it. We’ll have to have you over.
Back at the house we agree that the neighbors obviously thought we were angling for an apéritif, not a lawsuit. They seem agreeable and innocent; if not, they’re such good dissemblers that we’ll never get anything out of them.
“Their kids are nice, too,” Mindy says sourly. We know what we’re up against. It’s the affair of the well all over again.
• • •
One of the few charms of our house when we bought it was that it came with a well. Or, I should say, it once came with a well, a beehive of drystone, situated on the opposite side of our dirt lane. But somehow we lost it.
How? We were careless, I suppose. Village usage and ownership of common space is a tricky thing. A grove of trees, a trickling spring, a parking space, a crumbling wall—all can be sources of intense obsession over who actually owns it and what they can do with it. Alexis de Tocqueville writes in The Old Regime and the Revolution that even for open space there may be a proprietary connection going back two hundred or more years. (Move your shadow!) And that was certainly the case in Kerbordardoué. Lean your bicycle against the wrong barn for more than a couple of hours and you may hear about it, not from the owner, but from your neighbor who heard from someone else. You have incurred a village demerit. Take care or your children may inherit it.