“Not really,” I said. “Elysius is the one who …”
“No. Your sister has your mother’s face, but you,” she said, “you have your mother in you.” She tapped her chest. “The way you look at the mountain. Your sister never looked at the mountain like that. She is …” Véronique snapped her fingers in the air around her head, her eyes darting from one snap to the next.
“Distracted?”
“Distracted,” she said. “Yes. But you.” She shook her head and really looked at me for what felt like the first time. I wasn’t sure what she was seeing. “Have you asked yourself why your mother never returned here?”
I knew there were many very complicated reasons. My mother loved this place, always wanted to return, but it was a sore spot between my parents. Even I had come to associate this place with her abandonment of us. “It’s far,” I said. “It’s expensive to get here.…”
“No,” she said. “It’s not that. Ask your mother. She has lessons.” She faced the wind and let it blow her hair back. I pictured Véronique as a little girl. She and my mother had known each other during their childhood summers. I imagined them doing something idyllic, running through the vineyards, row after row. Véronique said, “You know the Provençal summers are dry, which makes the earth and the air perfect for a fire, like the one that your mother saw before leaving. The fires burned the trees, cleared the earth, and that is why it’s possible for the archaeologists to dig.” She tapped her cane on the grass. “It is interesting, no? A tragedy, the fire, but it makes it possible to dig into the past.”
“Yes,” I said. This was a metaphor, of course. Was the tragedy my mother’s, the near loss of her marriage that summer, her heartache? Or perhaps Véronique’s own failed marriage? Or was she talking about my own tragedy, Henry’s death? Was it now time to dig?
Regardless of how I was supposed to read the metaphor, it was a conclusion. The tour was over. Véronique started to walk back to her house. Her hobbled gait was so quick and strong that it seemed her limp was propelling her forward, not holding her back. She called out, “In the end, your mother, that thief may surprise you.”
She already had.
n the gusty wind of the convertible, Julien explained that we shouldn’t mistake Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume for Saint Maximin, another cathedral not too far away, in Arles. “The main difference is that this one has the body of Mary Magdelene and that one doesn’t.” We were on our promised outing of a cathedral and warthogs—cathedral first, as warthogs were the reward for enduring a cathedral.
“Wasn’t Mary Magdalene hanging out in the Middle East with Jesus?” Charlotte said.
“She was,” Julien said. “But then!” He lifted his finger in the air. “She got on a fragile little boat without a sail, without a rudder, along with Maximin, before he became a saint. And there were others—and they found themselves in Marseille. A miracle.”
“It sounds miraculous,” Charlotte said, “in a touristy way.”
“I think pilgrim is the old word for ‘tourist,’ ” Julien said.
“Well, then, it’s very pilgrimy.”
“How did she die?” Abbot asked. He was sitting in the backseat with his arms folded and propped on the door, the air pushing his hair straight up off his face. His brow was furrowed, his eyes narrowed to keep from tearing up in the wind.
“She converted the people of Marseille, and then when she was old she was living in a cave in the Sainte-Baume mountains.”
“But how did she die?” he asked.
“I think she was very old,” I said. “She died peacefully because she was old. The way most people die.” I knew that Abbot was afraid of dying before his time, like his father. Death must have felt like a legacy. I couldn’t imagine such a weight. I tried to explain to him at every chance that death was usually a very natural process at the end of a long life. I worried that I hadn’t talked about death with him enough, and I worried I’d talked about it too much.
Abbot lifted his raw hands, letting the wind stream through his fingers. Did he think he was getting rid of germs this way, like the heat of a hand blower in a restaurant bathroom? “Where is her body?” he asked. “In the church?”
“In a crypt in the church,” Julien said. “And they have the best graffiti. Really. It is very old.”
“Antique graffiti,” Charlotte said. “Interesting.”
I wondered if I should tell Charlotte that Adam Briskowitz was going to write her a letter explaining everything. She’d seemed much lighter since we’d arrived, freer, funnier, less … doomed. I didn’t want a surprise letter to break the spell. But she could choose to ignore it when it arrived, like the messages. She obviously had that kind of willpower. I decided to wait.
There was a square in front of the cathedral with a stone slab bench and a kind of trough fed by a single water spigot. We ate our sack lunches there in the sun, sandwiches of ham and butter, bottles of Orangina, and water. We watched a woman let her dog drink from the trough, and later a man drank from it himself. Abbot finished quickly and ran around the square. Like most open areas that we’d come across in France, there were lots of cigarette butts and hardened, sun-dried dog poops. Abbot pointed out all of the poops as if on patrol. This was the kind of thing that was unique about traveling with children. They had a different worldview—sometimes because of their innocence and sometimes simply because they are positioned lower to the ground.
The cathedral was made of uneven gray stone with massive, dark, wooden doors. Inside, it was narrow, dim, and tall. There was a small pulpit to one side with a short, curved staircase. Hidden near it, Abbot uncovered a sound system with lights and knobs, which I told him not to touch. It was unseemly. The voice of a man of God should reverberate naturally, or so it seemed to me.
Charlotte drifted again to the nooks of the cathedral, just as she had at Notre-Dame. The nave was lined on either side by sixteen chapels. She worked her way down the row of chapels, pausing at each one, taking in the art, and then she stopped at one to pray. Her father and Elysius were atheists. I tried to remember if her mother was religious. She struck me as New Agey, but I couldn’t say. I didn’t really know her. But Charlotte, with her blue, black-tipped hair and her nose ring, looked oddly as if she’d found the right place to be. She looked at ease, head bowed, hands clasped. I envied this. I’d been one to pray at night before bed as a kind of meditation. But when Henry died, I felt shut off. I couldn’t remember what I’d once prayed for or how. It was as if prayer were a foreign language that I’d once known but could no longer remember even in the most pidgin way. I remembered the idea of prayer, the feeling of calm that I’d had even as a child, but it seemed very distant now.
Julien walked up. “Abbot wants to search for the crypt.”
“Huh,” I said. I worried for a moment about this morbid fascination—the crypt here, the archaeological dig near the house. Was it odd that Abbot wasn’t afraid of their germs? I doubted he really remembered his father’s funeral. We’d never really talked about his death—I always concentrated on the living Henry. Perhaps Abbot’s interest in death was because I’d blotted it out—or wasn’t it the normal fascination of any child?
“Is that sacrilegious?” Julien asked. He said sacrilegious in a French accent and then asked, “Is it the same word in English?”
“It is,” I said, choosing to let go a little. “And it’s fine. He can search for the crypt.”
“Okay.” Julien walked down the aisle to Abbot, gave him a pat on the back, and said, “Come to us when you find it.”
I sat in one of the pews. Julien walked back to me and took a seat beside me. His knee brushed mine as he sat down, and I noticed how long his legs were—or was it that the pews were made generations ago, for smaller people?
“Do you remember my mother when she was here that summer of the big fire?” I whispered.
He nodded. “I was only a kid,” he said, “in my own world, but yes. I remember her.”
“What was
she like?”
“She was quieter. And she took lessons. She worked in the garden. I saw her in the window of your house, looking at the mountain. She was lovesick. I knew that. And you weren’t here with your sister. Things were wrong.”
“Your mother called her a heart thief,” I said.
“What is a heart thief?”
“I thought you’d know.”
“I don’t.”
“She said that the doors to my mother’s heart were open and hers were closed.”
“This is an expression of my mother. She talks about people’s hearts this way, as rooms—sometimes locked rooms.”
“I think my mother had an affair here,” I said.
“People fall in love,” he said, looking up at the tall pipes of the organ encased in dark wood.
“She was here because my father had an affair. She kind of disappeared. We didn’t know if she was coming back. Maybe she thought about not coming back.”
“My father left and didn’t come back. You have good luck. She came home.”
I nodded. Véronique had been goading me, hadn’t she? She wanted me to ask my mother. She’d said that my mother had lessons, something to pass down. But my mother’s lost summer was her own. If she’d wanted to tell me about it, she would have. Perhaps that was an important thing about lost summers: they should stay lost.
Abbot ran up to us now, breathless. “I found this place that has steps going down and I think it’s in there. I think that’s the crypt.”
“Show us,” Julien said.
Charlotte wandered over, and the three of us followed Abbot to a set of stone steps leading down into a darkened room.
“Look at this,” Charlotte said, and she ran her hand on the engraved graffiti. “It’s from 1765. And here, this one is from 1691. Who was the wisecracker in 1691?”
I said, “There are wisecrackers throughout history, I guess.”
“There’s graffiti in here that’s older than our entire country,” Charlotte said. “If this were our graffiti, we’d have a museum just for it in D.C., on the mall. We’re ancient-deprived.”
“But we invented the cowboy hat,” I said. “Or at least I’m pretty sure we invented the cowboy hat.”
We walked down the dim, narrow stairs, Abbot first. He stopped at the bottom of the steps. We all looked to the other end of the small, empty crypt, with its low, domed ceiling. There, in a halo of light, was what looked to be a golden helmet. A sarcophagus. The remains of Sainte Marie-Madeleine—Mary Magdalene.
“There!” Abbot said, and he started running toward it.
“Wait,” Julien said.
But it was too late. Abbot didn’t see the reflection of light off the Plexiglas protecting the sarcophagus, and he went flying into it, like a bird into a window. He fell backward onto the floor, hitting it so hard that the back of his head rapped off the stone with a sickening thunk.
“Abbot!” I cried out and knelt next to him. “Are you okay, baby?” I fit my hand on the back of his head, searching for blood. His head was dry, but there was already a red welt on his forehead. I thought of concussions and hospitals. I imagined French doctors like the French police, lazing around in their sweater vests wanting to talk to me about Daryl Hannah. A small flare of anger rose in my chest. Why was I angry? Because I was alone. Henry had left me here, alone. He wasn’t on the shore this time, calling to us in the ocean, telling us that we’d paddled out too far, too far.
Abbot slowly lifted his head. His eyes filled with tears, and then he blinked two tears that rolled down his cheeks. He looked at his palms, held them open in front of his face. Already raw from washing, they were scuffed with dirt, thinly scratched, a little bloody. But he didn’t rub them together. He looked at me, smiling. “I found her,” he said. “She’s shining!”
efore getting back in the car after the cathedral, I washed Abbot’s hands with the leftover water from my bottle. I waited for him to tell me that I’d drunk out of the bottle and therefore my germs could get into his cut. But he didn’t. He was quiet, distracted. The red welt had popped up into a small, blue knot on his forehead, and there was a matching knot on the back of his head from whacking it on the stone. I made him look up at me so I could test for a concussion. He was facing the sun, and I made sure his pupils were dilating in unison. I was relieved to see that they were. Julien found a little pottery shop in the square that was open and, in the back, the potter had a small fridge with ice. I was now applying napkin-wrapped ice to both the front and back of Abbot’s head.
“We could go home and relax,” I said. “Eat little glazed cakes.”
“I think he has had a miracle,” Julien said. “Do you eat cake after a miracle?”
“What kind of miracle was it?” Abbot asked.
“I don’t know,” Julien said. “We have to wait to see what happens to you. Were you blind and now you can see?”
“I’ve never been blind,” Abbot said.
“We should go home,” I said. “It’s always appropriate to eat little glazed cakes.”
“Absterizer?” Charlotte said. “What do you want to do, warthogs or cake?”
“Warthogs,” Abbot said. He was determined. I looked at him with the small, blue egg in the center of his forehead and thought of the word blessure—French for an “injury.” But this was an English word, too—to be blessed on the head was to be struck. Abbot had a blessure. He was blessed.
I insisted on sitting in the backseat next to Abbot, though he edged up close to the door, wringing out the soaked napkins and staring out at the passing landscape, vineyards upon vineyards. Charlotte sat up front, and, music-deprived since the loss of her iPod, she fiddled with the radio. Bad Euro techno-pop song after bad Euro techno-pop song, she finally lighted on ABBA and we were all weirdly relieved when she let the song play out.
Julien followed signs for the Legion Etrangere down a dusty dirt road. “This is where some of the real legionnaires are,” Julien said to me. “The ones from the black-and-white movies. There are little houses out here for the elderly veterans and some who need special care, rehabilitation.”
“Warthog rehab?” Charlotte said.
“I don’t know why a person decided to bring warthogs here,” Julien said. “But they’re here.”
“C’est comme ça,” I said.
“What’s that mean?” Abbot asked.
“It means ‘it’s like that.’ It’s a French expression,” I said.
“Because sometimes things just are like that. That’s all. It’s just—like that,” Julien said.
“That’s true,” Charlotte said. “Things are like that.”
We parked and walked up the long road to the pens. We smelled the warthogs before we could see them—a dank, beastly smell. The warthogs were massive, coming up as high as Abbot’s waist. They had broad barrel ribs; wide, mud-caked rumps with skinny tails; sparse, wiry fur; tusks that curved up from their rubbery snouts. Their hooves were comparatively dainty, as were their back legs, which seemed to buckle, making them look knock-kneed from behind. They blended in with the dusty pen, pitted with mud holes and hollow logs. Some of them trotted away when we arrived. Others bumped up angrily against the metal fence, deep, growling grunts in their throats. A few were fixed by the water trough and food—seeds and grains piled on a cement pad near a row of little cavelike huts that the warthogs could retreat into. Only one seemed to want to nuzzle a hand. Abbot was gazing at this one eye-to-eye through the fence.
“He’s dirty,” Abbot said.
“Really dirty,” I said, for once relieved that my child was phobic and wouldn’t be shoving his hand through the fence to touch them.
“Very dirty,” Julien said, leaning on the fence.
“Look,” Charlotte said. “There’re little ones.” She pointed to a back corner of the pen where, between their hefty mothers, there were some young warthogs, whose legs seemed longer and more proportioned to their not-yet-wide bodies. “The little ones look just like the big ones, onl
y smaller.”
“But without tusks,” Julien said.
“It would be rude to have to birth something that had tusks,” I said.
“It’s hot,” Charlotte said. “Let’s go back to the car. Big pigs in a pen. I get it.” The sudden shift in mood surprised me only in that I hadn’t seen more of it. It’s what Elysius had warned me to expect.
“Warthogs are natives in West Africa,” Julien said.
“I’m done,” Charlotte said, and with that, she started walking back to the car.
I kept my attention fixed on the wart hogs. I was impressed with how the warthogs were of the earth—that was the expression that kept coming to me. They were of the earth—not off in their heads, not always living in their minds. They weren’t, from what I could tell, obsessed with the past.
Abbot said, “They live in all that dirt and their own poop.”
“And they’re completely fine,” Julien said, “except they’re in exile, in a little foreign prison.” I thought of Julien’s divorce and how much he must have been missing his four-year-old daughter, Frieda. I wondered if she looked like him—his dark eyes, his quick smile.
“But at least it’s a real prison,” I said. “Not a metaphor, like the Parisian couple who thought the burnt house was a symbol of their life together.”
He smiled at me. “Very true!”
“They’re really of the earth,” I said. “Look at them. They blend in with the dirt and the log. They root around and they wallow.”
“In dirt and poop,” Abbot said.
“You can touch them,” Julien said. “They live in dirt and poop, but they are happy with it.”
Abbot looked at me. The shiny blue welt on the middle of his head reminded me of the small candy-coated robin-sized eggs that showed up on shelves just before Easter. I’m just a bunny, you know. There’s only so much that I can understand. I stared at the warthogs. I wondered what Henry would think of us here—Abbot’s head doubly blessed, standing by the filth of warthogs. I imagined that if Henry were here, he’d be worried—not a lot, just that small stitch of worry in his brow, the leftover guilt from his brother’s near drowning still tugging on him in ways he couldn’t control. We would both convince the other that Abbot was fine. We’d tell each other that it obviously wasn’t a concussion, that he was going to be okay. Abbot was our only child, and so there was no one to diffuse our parental anxiety, but we were also a good team, balancing out worry with reason. “Pet a warthog,” one of us would have said. “Live a little!” the other would have chimed in.
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Page 18