by Don Wallace
In the case of our well, the link was broken somewhere in the buying process between the verbal representation of the notary and the formal plat, or cadastre, filed with the Mairie, or mayor’s office, and we didn’t even know it. We only found out years later, when someone said something about one neighbor refusing to let another neighbor run a hose from the well during a drought, because it was his. We were appalled at our neighbor’s uncharitableness. But then it struck us: “His? Oh, really?” we replied. “That’s odd. Because it’s actually ours.”
The villager we were talking to looked at us. “You know that it’s yours?”
“But of course. Why wouldn’t we know?”
“Oh. I see. It’s just that we thought… But how did you know?”
“Why wouldn’t we know?”
“I see. But how long have you known?”
“Forever. Since we came here.”
“Oh. But if you’ve always known, why didn’t you say something?”
“Why should we say something? We know it’s our well. That’s enough for us.”
And so forth.
Once in a while that summer we looked at our neighbor’s house and thought: But we’re friends! When did you decide to take our well? Did you do it because we were Americans? Did you think we were thick? Too wimpish to fight?
We thought about visiting the Mairie to reassert our ownership of the well. We thought about starting a whispering campaign to spread the news that we were aware it was ours and would lay full claim to it. But to stake our rightful claim to the well carried dangers, some we could see, others we couldn’t. A visit to the Mairie might open up a discussion of other cans of worms we didn’t want opened.
Also, we liked our neighbor and his wife and their children. To quarrel over the use of a well seemed petty, particularly as we could quite possibly be living next door to each other for another thirty years, and our respective children might be after that. At last a village truth dawned on us. We had no use for the well. Why pretend we cared who owned it? The well wasn’t going anywhere. We could still look at it all we wanted. The day we agreed to make no more noise about it, we felt a load taken off our backs.
• • •
There’s a rumble and the glass in our front door vibrates as a car passes, too close. The renters, locataires, again.
Hour by hour, day by day, Mindy grows more furious, and not just at having our peaceful sanctuary violated. The communal spirit has been desecrated in a premeditated act, Franck and Ines and the new island neighbors collaborating to steal the road during the dark of winter. Then Franck and Ines must’ve used the garden, and lack of a road, as a selling point as they quickly unloaded their house.
But other than a complaining, muttering Suzanne, we can find no one who will admit to what has happened. Late every night Mindy threatens to go to the Mairie de Sauzon and demand to look at the village cadastre, but every morning an instinct for self-preservation kicks in—or else the day is so fresh and beautiful she just can’t bear to gird her loins and go into battle with the French bureaucracy. Best to wait until the last week of August when Gwened arrives. Then we can strategize.
We cook a lavish welcoming dinner on Gwened’s first night, coquilles St. Jacques, cold langoustines with mayonnaise, barbecued baby lamb chops with springs of fresh rosemary, garden potatoes and carrots and salad. A portrait of composure, Gwened honors our efforts with a great show of concentration and over each dish pronounces a mandarin approval, although, being Gwened, she barely eats. Still, we have passed a test, and in a Frenchwoman’s own kitchen. That’s a big deal.
The whole time we’re bursting to tell but holding our tongues. At last Mindy can no longer stand it. She tries to sound calm: “We noticed that the road is gone.”
“Yes, it is quite a change. I’m afraid our poor little village is losing its character.”
“Then we should go to the Mairie. Surely someone can’t just steal a road?”
Gwened readily agrees that this is how it must look to us, but, she adds, we must understand that there is a Belle Île way of looking at things, too. Her manner is resigned and her point of view Olympian.
Naturally the story is more complicated than we might guess. First Madame Morgane’s son sweet-talked her into allowing him to build a summer house in the barnyard, so that he could bring his family and her grandchildren to visit more often. House done, he turned it into a holiday rental. The renters driving back and forth in front of Madame Morgane’s also passed her daughter’s house, at all hours of the day and night, which led the daughter to bar the gravel driveway. Whereupon the son told the renters to drive down the road, hang a right at the corner of Franck and Ines and, when they reached the square, to continue on through the rough terrain behind our house. Their tire tracks became the basis of a new road.
But all the traffic disturbed Franck and Ines. Actually it terrified them. Their youngest was a toddler given to wandering out the door, which opened directly onto the road, like ours. Anytime Ines’s back was turned, he’d make a run for it.
A kitten was run over, squashed flat, on their doorstep. That’s when the idea of blocking the road came to them, Gwened says. It was a coincidence that the neighboring Bellilois house happened to shift occupants, but also a blessing because the new faces were parents and sympathetic. (Also calculating; as anyone who is familiar with Manon of the Spring would know, the French country mind is always thinking about new ways to add more land.) And so, Gwened shrugs, one day the backhoe arrived, followed by the truck from the nursery. Deed done, all parties could sleep easier—literally.
“Except for us and Suzanne! Since all the traffic is now funneled past our doors!” In exasperation and anger, Mindy has raised her voice to her old teacher.
Gwened is silent for a long time. Then she explains that the deed of sale is signed and registered. We know all the parties involved except the buyers, and they are such delightful people, are they not? Her tone is clear, as is her inference: maybe we are not delightful people, as she once thought. Maybe this is what you get for not finishing the house all those years. All those years, the village looked the worse for your neglect and you didn’t care.
She shrugs. Anyway, when the time came to change the road it was just accepted, because nobody lived on your lane. So that was where the traffic belonged.
“But we have no garden, no land, between us and the road,” says Mindy, close to tears. “There will be dust, noise. And Rory. He could get run over, you know.”
“Yes,” says Gwened, “I’m afraid you will suffer, especially in the summer. You might want to consider selling the house. Or, if you do finish it, to come only in the winter.”
Mindy is shocked. “I just can’t believe that everyone could stand by and let this happen.”
Gwened nods. “I very much disapprove of how it was done. But it is done.”
“What about Suzanne?” asks Mindy. “She’s old. Someone could run her down. She has kittens, too. Didn’t anyone think about what this does to her?”
Gwened’s silence is devastating. Could it be that Suzanne is a nobody even to sensitive Gwened, who sings the praises of her flowers all summer long? Really?
Somehow, Mindy finds the strength to stay silent, bottle her anger.
There are moments when the force and rigidity of class culture is revealed in all its cruelty, like substrate rock underlying sandy soil. It takes a big storm to reveal it. We’re having our big storm. Now, with the new title registered, remediation will be much more difficult. Usages ruraux, our Breton lawyer Sylvie had said, can change over time if it is not contested. We know where we stand. We won’t contest it.
• • •
On one of our last few days, Mindy goes into Gwened’s shed and comes out carrying a pickax and a shovel. “Come on,” she says, heading out into the square. I follow, alarmed. She can’t really be thinking of tearing out the
neighbor’s hedge and leveling the berm, can she? We’ll probably end up in jail.
She stops in front of our house, though. Staring hard, she walks along our wall, dragging the pickax behind her. It makes a line in the powdery white dirt about four feet away from our doorstep and sad, stained, once-white wall. “This will be our garden.” I can see she’s been thinking this through when she adds, “Not all at once. We stake a claim by planting something here,” walking back and planting the pick at a spot about three feet out from our doorstep. Where our plastered wall ends is where the cars make their turn to get to the tourist villa. “It has to be something hardy that will grow while we’re gone. Something prickly, to make the tourists swing wide past our house so they don’t scratch their precious rental cars.”
In her khaki shorts and faded blue camisole Mindy nevertheless looks like a general surveying defensive terrain before a battle. Hefting the pick high above her head, she brings it down hard on the packed earth. “We’re going to plant a rose.”
Chapter Fifteen
Who Kills a Rose?
In New York that fall, we carried Belle Île like a lucky rabbit’s foot. Our boy had the glow and physical grace that comes of being out in nature for weeks on end. We were pretty lean and loose-limbed ourselves, en bonne forme. Within a month of our return, Mindy found herself interviewing for a new job, her first since Rory’s arrival, and was quickly snapped up. (Because of her sun-streaked russet tresses, no doubt.) Now she spent her days working to preserve undeveloped forest, beaches, and watershed, good for the bank account and good for the soul.
The April publication of Hot Water was still far, far away, but I walked in a fog of daydreams and acute sensitivity to the great changes to come in my life. And then suddenly here it was, just around the corner. By mid-March I had an advance copy of my book (my book!) and carried it with me on the subway for the first few mornings, thinking this was the way to build word-of-mouth until the New York Times wrote about it. Then I began to worry that someone would recognize me from the author jacket photo on the back and wonder at my shamelessness and the New York Times would write about that.
The day arrived. At lunch I walked over to the Barnes & Noble at Grand Central and browsed the stacks. There it was!
One copy, but still. I was torn by the desire to buy it or go up to the desk and request it (but then I’d have to buy it). In the end I explained my dilemma to the clerk who agreed to order two more copies to have in stock.
That Friday I was at my desk when the phone rang. There was a business contact on the line. “Go now,” she said, “and buy the Washington Post. The culture section. First page.”
• • •
By July, Hot Water has come and, bookstore clerks apologetically tell me, is going, going…gone. My, that was fast.
But the rave Washington Post review is on the wall at Success, where my editor in chief put it with a goading glance at his two right-wing minions. It’s a funny world; I think he’s actually proud of me. When I ask again about going to Belle Île, he waves a hand and says, “Whatever. Go. You know, I saw a lot of Success in your book.”
“Let’s keep that our secret,” I say.
We shake on it. And with that pat on the back, I go back to the mines and start coining more of my Belle Île currency: freelance articles. My output is at an all-time high. That has to be good, right? While I may not be working at a Manhattan name-dropper’s job, at least I have the satisfaction that goes with all the work, the interviews, the cover stories, the editing, on top of which are the freelance book reviews, essays, and stories. In trying to get ahead to pay for Belle Île without shortchanging Rory, I’ve found another gear. Watch me zoom.
But in truth I’m unhappy, at times desperately. I published a novel and it didn’t change my life one bit. Meanwhile I feel I’m shoveling shit into my brain and dishing it out in 1,500-word chunks for predigested consumption. In this I’m not alone, nor do I delude myself that I’m any different from my friends sweating out their lives in cubicles next to mine. Journalism is a messy craft, and its temporal quality rebukes any pretensions of writing for the ages. Instead of immortality, we get to bitch, colorfully and extravagantly. That is the joy of a newsroom. But you can’t take it with you.
My one shot at immortality—okay, at making the back wall of the Strand Bookstore—seems destined for the same fate. Too late to ditch my dreams, I can only hope there’s a second act down the line.
• • •
Around this time we get a letter from France:
My dear friends,
A very nice couple from Paris rented the new villa behind your house over Noël and fell in love with the village. They would like to write you to ask if you’d be interested in selling your house. I hope this does not derange you, but I told them to go ahead and gave them your address. They are charming and would make good neighbors. They have three small children but are willing to keep such a small house as yours. I do hope you will entertain their offer. It is important that the village center have life, and your house is quite forlorn now.
With my best wishes,
Gwened
So, dear muse, it’s good-bye, Belle Île, just like that? Thanks for the memories? Je ne regrette rien, or maybe, je regret vous?
We haven’t recovered at all when a letter comes from the young couple of Paris. To our dismay Gwened is right and they are nice. They seem acutely aware of the pain their inquiry must be giving, and choose their words carefully and compassionately, a delicacy of temperament that is explained further down in the letter when they mention they are psychiatrists. Of course, being Parisians, they can’t resist exclaiming that they love New York.
Mindy refuses to reply. She has had to write so many letters in French to France, to Madame Morgane and Suzanne and Gwened, to the Mairie de Sauzon and our insurance agent, to Denis LeReveur and all his crew. Every single letter that she has written has gone toward the realization of the house, our dream. I can tell the thought of this one rips her heart out.
I take it upon myself to ease her pain. Taking down Le Petit Larousse, I laboriously construct what I conceive to be a graceful letter, explaining our deep attachment to the house and how much we hope to one day spend the night under its roof, and ending with a jolly “We love Paris!” Later, of course, I will be informed that I have called the husband a woman and the wife a man in the coarsest possible terms. I’ve also apparently claimed that Paris loves me more than them.
Regardless of my illiteracy, the answer is still no.
But we don’t dismiss Gwened’s letter. She’s right. This may be her version of shock treatment, but we deserve the bucket of cold water in the face. We are letting down the village. But we seem stuck. We can go back to Brigadoon or finish the house, but we can’t do both.
• • •
Traveling once again. Dreamlike France. Dream in French. Dream = rêve. So, a reverie of repetition. Rêve, rêve, rêve your boat, gently down the stream… Like a filmstrip run backwards, we retrace our steps and movements from the years before.
In a sleep-deprived daze we hum hymns to the beauty of transatlantic planes and trains so various and reliable. We grunt along with the shudder of the ferry Guerveur when her blunted steel-riveted parrotfish prow bites into the first big ocean swell, and the next, and the next. With the other passengers we crowd the rail as the island comes in sight. Adult restraint falls away and we join everyone in cheering the two blasts of the ferry’s horn. Inside the harbor’s tight basin, behind a narrow mole, our captain spins the ship in her length, bow thrusters and screws churning up boils of yellow mud. The cargo door in the side clangs open onto a stone ramp that rises from under the harbor waters to the quai. We’re here.
We could almost raise a chant: “We’re here, we’re here,” as we march shoulder to shoulder with the other passengers to street level, like the Communards of Les Soixante-Dix to the barricades. Meanwhile
the ferry disgorges cars, trucks, bicycles, and even a silver motorcycle with a sidecar.
The quai is lined with waving, smiling friends and family. Although they’re not here for us, that’s all right. Because we’re not tourists or visitors who need a welcoming reception; we live here, sometimes. We have a house!
We’re feeling buoyant; the universe feels generous today. Even the taxis look good—“It’s just so France!” I say, inanely, at the sight of the drivers (two male, one female) leaning against the hoods of their cars and smoking. But this year we’re renting a dented Citroën Deux Chevaux, exorbitantly priced. So we pile in and urge it, chug-chug, up the hill leaving Le Palais, then cry “Whee!” as it rattles like a roller coaster down the other side, and then up and down, swooping over the vertebrae of the central plateau. The twists and turns of village lanes slow us to a crawl until, enfin, we’re pulling up in our little, white-powdered dusty square. We set the parking brake with a jerk. The car door creaks an awful protest. Stretching our backs, we take in the village.
But then:
“The rose is dead!”
• • •
Poor rose, we stand over you, flattened into what once was mud, now baked into the hardpan. A sad, twisted stalk and a couple of tiny branched arms, no bigger than when we planted you. You look like a fossil or a stillborn from a Neolithic barrow grave.
“It never even had a chance.” Mindy sighs. “I guess the renters didn’t see it in time.”
We stand over the fossil rose. Rory crouches and touches the ridges of mud squished up by the tires of a car or truck and then frozen by winter temperatures and dried in the kiln of spring and summer. There are a lot of ridges and herringbone tire tracks, a crisscrossing, as in multiple times driven over the rose. A lot of times.