A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  It shocked her. How could such a summation of her most personal feelings exist in such a public context?

  SOUS LES PAVÉS, LA PLAGE

  †

  Under the cobblestones lies the beach. During the Second Empire, when Napoleon III was forever rearranging the city from a clutch of pokey narrow-laned heartzones to Haussmann’s pristine wide boulevards, he knew the cobbles were a threat. To take the edge off, to defang the ready-made weaponry the people of Paris had used for centuries when rising up against such impositions, Haussmann arranged for wooden cobbles to replace the stone ones in certain sections of the city. But although the wooden cobbles made for less dangerous missiles in the hands of the displaced, it was still the case that the rain must fall, and the wheel, the horseshoe and the footstep must impress their weight upon the ground beneath them. Sure enough, the wooden cobbles would soon ruckle the roadways, buckling, splitting and bowing, frightening the horses, unsettling the carriages, even twisting the ankles of old watercarriers. Eventually, despite Haussmann’s dream of disarming the ingrates, the wooden blocks had to be replaced again with the heft and durability of stone cobbles.

  FB had had to pick the French words of the phrase apart in his mind until he could arrange them in a way that held both grammar and reason in hand. It was often this way. First he would see the phrase, then he would inspect and verify each word, and then allow them all to reconstitute back into the phrase.

  SOUS LES PAVÉS, LA PLAGE

  He smiled. He had walked past the heaps and mounds of cobbles with Mathilde, seen the ingredients of the barricades, and she had told him how they were hurled on the Friday night. He had seen the sand, too, with his own eyes and, strangely, thought nothing of it. But it was true. Under the reefs of cobbles lay the sand that stabilised the streets. The cobble bed. The paver’s sand. The cobble’s beach.

  But now, in the brilliance of the late light of the day, he smiled for the way things had been reinterpreted. The poetry of the moment surprised him. How closely the scrawled phrase approximated his feelings.

  There was something else, yes, and it lay within us, buried beneath the faces, the personalities, the cities we have made.

  And he had this other thought as he walked beside the phrase written on the wall: even freedom can become a prison in the end.

  10

  Sand Gathers Around the Dead

  Even as I write this I feel his story grinding down like silica in my hands. His papers are blown sand, nibbled-at reefs, shingle on the shores of my imagination. Time, which often seems to be a synonym for wind, ruffles the sequence and softens the sharp edges. The moments that moved him, each moment as it relaxed or tightened his heart, is compressed down into the under-marl. What was active and dynamic in the margins of history’s momentous day is manageable now, somehow smooth and rounded.

  This is how nostalgia makes its inevitable case, this time for me to view FB and Mathilde as subjects of some hand-tipped picture postcard, or an oversaturated image offered up by Google, of two young lovers in the hip 1960s, touristic emblems presented by the Department for the History of Western Youth.

  But sand isn’t like that, it will not stay within the frame. And sand dunes – the forms that sand makes – come about not with open ease but in a turbulence created by limitation. They take shape, like young love itself, in the shadow of obstacles. It could be a wind-sculpted plant, it may be a dysfunctional family, or, in wider, more conceptual terms, it could find its form in the lee of a patriarchal resistance to a flexible proposal for the revolution of the world. Whatever the case, the sand as it formed in the shadow of the obstacle-personage that was known in 1968 by the name of Charles de Gaulle was made up of a million cellular impulses, organic motions, continuities and disjunctures. No longer would it suffice for the known world, or even a single coast of that world, to be painted as a mere copy of itself. The formerly invisible inner life had somehow now to be included: the life of the perceiver, the life of the wild, the neon of dreams, the catharsis of desire, the untheoretical edge of frustration. De Gaulle and his Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS, with their riot shields, their tear gas and batons, could not pretend any longer that the destiny of France was set in stone. The edifice itself was crumbling, the old regime granulating in a historical storm surge, its cobbles hurled back at itself from spirited, insouciant hands. Formerly unassailable heights were now scoured into valleys, alpine peaks crumbling off into the streams and sea-bound rivers of everyday life. And there, at the open mouths of the sea, the grains sifted along the coast, the same ocean coast of Western Europe where the young theosophist Piet Mondrian had painted the heaped-up grains onto canvases, characterising them as interiorised hummocks, lucid forms which decades later came to grace the walls of the Galerie Sarcon in the Rue des Quatre-Vents.

  In Balzac’s short story ‘The Atheist’s Mass’, which he wrote in 1836, Rue des Quatre-Vents is described as ‘one of the most disgusting streets in Paris’. At that time Paris had yet to be reconstituted into Haussmann’s boulevards and Rue des Quatre-Vents was one of those small streets that existed as squalid but beloved homes of the poor. By 1968, however, Rue des Quatre-Vents had well and truly entered a new epoch, along with the rest of the Rive Gauche, as a tourist destination tinted with cultural glamour. Even the fact that Balzac had mentioned it in ‘The Atheist’s Mass’ and in other stories from La Comédie humaine, such as Lost Illusions, gave it a certain lustre. This is the fetishisation of the historical ghetto, the Rue des Quatre-Vents as miasmic cradle and nursery to literary heroes. But when FB arrived at the gallery a few minutes after 7 pm he was thinking of none of that. Finding the gallery open he simply smiled to himself and stepped inside.

  The small foyer was office-like, industrious, a little like the concierge counter of a small hotel. Typically Marguerite Tindel, the gallery owner, would be positioned behind the counter, tapping out publicity releases or other correspondence on her grey Olivetti typewriter, greeting customers as they came in to view the current exhibition, enquire about the next one or meet with her husband Jean on gallery business. It was sometimes the case though, that the only person she would see during the course of the day was a tourist asking directions to the Luxembourg Gardens, or the old postman Raymond, whose delivery of bills and overdue accounts at least came with a phlegmatic joke in his Bretagne burr, usually about the rudeness of bus drivers, who it seemed regularly attempted to mow the old postman’s scooter down.

  A few minutes after 7 pm, however, FB found not just Marguerite Tindel behind the counter but also her husband Jean, and three friends, all of whom were laughing gaily and drinking wine. They seemed almost surprised at first to see the young Australian in his overcoat enter but quickly assured him that although they had left the gallery doors open purely out of absent-mindedness, he was nonetheless welcome to renew his acquaintance with the Mondrians. But first, they said, he must have a drink with them.

  Coming out from behind the counter, Jean Tindel thrust a glass of white wine into Francis’s hand and, clapping him on the back, began to regale him with his own excited reflections on the day’s events.

  So when Mathilde peered through the glass doors of the Galerie Sarcon at approximately 7.15 she found that not only was the gallery open, but Francis was already inside, and not only was he already inside, but he was socialising, glass in hand, with the gallery owners!

  Given that she had spent the whole day exiled in solitude in her apartment on the Rue Monge, trying to soothe the turgid motions of her ovaries and to ignore the mass demonstrations outside, she could only speculate as to what the momentous day had brought to the city, and how, or if, it would change the situation for students and workers, for the whole culture in fact. But she needed no further proof that the day on the streets had indeed been transformative than to see the shy, emotionally reticent Australian partying like a native with the bourgeois owners of the Galerie Sarcon.

 
; This is, I suppose, the kind of misreading that can infect us when we take ourselves out of the loop. Suddenly it was as if there was not a public crisis occurring on the streets of Paris but a massive street party of which the little gathering in the office-foyer of the gallery was a satellite. And Mathilde had missed it all. What would she say to her father? ‘Papa, I built my own barricade out of Coca-Cola and blankets, in solidarity with the revolution occurring within my body.’ Or, ‘The streets were filled with thugs and boors, the day would run its course. I decided early on that the only sincere and authentic course of action was to stay well out of it. Nothing I found in Sarraute contradicted that position.’ She could hear her father’s ‘Pah!’ already. She could also feel his confusion and disappointment.

  For a moment, there on the other side of the glass, she thought about turning back. She would step away, immure herself in ordinary time, leave history to the bourgeoisie and the mob. She would step into her imaginary pinasse, sail back out of the Rue des Quatre-Vents, along the cross-currents and the turbulent shifting spits and shoals of the capital, until she would moor again at her own island on the Rue Monge.

  It was so strange to even have such an impulse. She of all people. As the city of Paris transformed into a maze of sea lanes for her to sail in her childhood pinasse, something caught in her throat – was it a grain of sand, a clast? – and she pushed open the heavy glass door.

  †

  Once Mathilde had established that Francis had not suddenly become the most elegant and sophisticated young antipodean in Paris, a sense of normality returned to her. Turning with the others as she came through the doors it was immediately obvious that he was relieved to see her. As the introductions ensued it was clear that the Tindels and Francis Herschell were not so much bosom buddies of a revolution she had missed but mere acquaintances of a moment that would soon have passed. They had all been out there, from the Place de la République and across the Seine to Place Denfert-Rochereau. The gallery had been closed for the day and Francis had not of course been in to the university to prepare for his trip south. Nevertheless, they were not brethren of the Commune. In fact, they were all still looking for a connection.

  One thing, however, did cement the common sense they had of the situation. With the arrival of Mathilde and the evidence that for herself and FB this amounted to some form of intuitive rendezvous, the gaze of Jean and Marguerite Tindel and their friends fell immediately, and fondly, on Mathilde and Francis as young lovers. The two of them felt the framework immediately. ‘Oh, so you know each other! Oh, so you have both come again to where you first met, in front of Mondrian’s dunes.’ The pleasure the group took in assembling such a tableau was palpable.

  So what did FB and Mathilde do in that situation? Did they, in the spirit of the day, react against this clichéd imposition and smash away and splinter the framework with their bare hands?

  They did not.

  After accepting a glass of wine from Marguerite Tindel and enduring a brief toast to the brilliant wit of Danny the Red, the ‘young couple’ were encouraged to proceed into the gallery proper to be alone with the dunes.

  The lights in the gallery had not been turned on yet and for a few moments as they paused between the foyer and the exhibition space they stood in a half-light only hinting at the rectangular outlines of the framed pictures. But then they heard Jean Tindel cry, ‘Pardon, pardon,’ as he hurried out from behind the counter to the set of four light switches by the gallery door. The switches were flicked. They heard the echo of the heavy clack of bakelite. There was a buzz, a splutter, and then all around them in the space the lights came on.

  †

  Sous les pavés, la plage. Under the cobblestones lies the beach.

  They had seen the paintings before, but in an instant now they became the environmental source of their connection. Surrounded by Mondrian’s dune slacks and slopes, and influenced by the nostalgic gaze of the Tindels and their friends, FB and Mathilde found a shared subset of the world.

  But it wasn’t as if they didn’t also resist it. Slowly, first apart, then arm in arm, they moved through the space looking at the pictures. FB, still feeling very much like a hick at a private ball, momentarily heard the scratchy sounds of his own violin butchering the Bruch along with the other players of the Moorabool Chamber Orchestra. And Mathilde, caught by surprise, felt a stubborn discomfort inside her at being somehow patronised and cultivated, not by Francis but by the Tindels and their middle-aged sentimentality.

  Nonetheless, what nature had heaped up at Domburg on the coast of Holland all those years ago did seem now like a halfway point, or compromise, between reality and the imagination. The dunes were cast anew not as sand but as plastic shapes of the painter’s brush. Yet they remained too, and at all times, the accumulating dunes of Domburg. FB and Mathilde discussed the paintings as they moved around the room, smelling the sand of the dunes that the ideas of the paintings transmitted, feeling the sanctuary of this miracle-beach, where freedom from history, from all its heavily gridded lines, once again seemed possible.

  Three

  11

  Polyp and Frond

  So this is all I have now: his papers. Each morning I rise, have breakfast, and then drive along the road Mr Lane built and that the young FB Herschell was subsequently assigned to fix. I feel its solidity under the tyres of my car and note the pleasing absence of a Bailey bridge. I travel through the cutting at Point Roadknight, over the bridge in Anglesea, up onto the ochre ridges beside the defunct coal mine and through the back blocks of the macrocarpa-sheltered farms heading north-east. Eventually I make it into Geelong and park my car in the usual spot next to the football stadium. From there I cross the train tracks, walk up over the rise and down to the small prime ministerial library at the university on the edge of the water. I go to my usual table amongst the shelves, beside which a trolley containing his archive waits for me.

  The boxes of the archive are loosely themed, but the papers are nevertheless wide and various. Slowly, day after day, the story has assembled itself in my mind, mainly through the miracle of his personal diaries of the time, but there are items, sentences, opinions and anecdotes in many of the other documents which pertain to what happened to him in France. And so I patch it together, reanimating the fertile mycelium I originally sensed under the pages of his book. I go travelling with him then to another country, another time, in which I take the liberty of seeking not only an explanation but a connection between what at first might appear to be disparate ingredients.

  A man like FB, with a mind so alive, goes on a long journey, no matter whether he travels or stays at home. I’m trying to learn from that journey, to find the secret of his quiet harmonies even as I face up to the difficulties of the truth.

  †

  They snacked near Blois, some two hundred kilometres south-west of Paris, in a patch of forest on the Loire at Chouzy-sur-Cisse, where Professor Lacombe explained, as they sat in the car looking through trees onto the river, how in Paleolithic times the Loire travelled further northwards and joined the Seine. Growing up in Rouen and mad for the natural world, Lacombe had studied what books he could find about the previous manifest of the landscape, all its slow changes. He had spent a period of time when he was about ten years old praying for a return to form on behalf of the rivers and alluvia, picturing in the unconstrained image-factory of his child’s mind the ecstatic moment when the Loire would reappear out of the south, like some returning soldier from Aquitaine, to join again with his beloved Seine. Professor Lacombe wondered aloud then, as if inspired by the vast geological timeframe, about how the foment they had just left behind in Paris would be perceived in the long light of the earth’s history. He proposed, in English, that it would amount to no more than a gust of wind. This was the very first indication on the journey of the long perspective which dominated the professor’s mind. It certainly made an impression on FB, who mentioned it in his diary
, with two exclamation marks after ‘wind’.

  Mathilde sat in the front passenger seat beside Professor Lacombe. FB sat in the back, trying to follow the snippets of their French conversation and looking out the window as they pushed on towards the coast. Their destination was the Bassin d’Arcachon, at the northern end of the largest forest in Europe. This pine forest, which stretched southwards along the Atlantic coast towards Spain, was a key plank in what Professor Lacombe had been teaching FB, indeed in what FB had travelled all the way from Australia to see. It was an entirely man-made forest and could thank for its existence the persistent and massive tides of the Atlantic coast, which created the ever-easterly movement of the giant dunes around Arcachon, where Mathilde grew up. The grand revolutionary project of planting out two hundred kilometres of coastal wetlands with the aromatic and resinous Pinus pinaster, in order to turn the salted wastes, or les landes, into productive timber-bearing land was in part the idea of the eighteenth-century engineer Nicolas Brémontier. Rather ironically Lacombe called Brémontier ‘Père des dunes’, or Father of the Dunes, because it was he who received all the credit for the techniques that helped build up the dunes such as the Dune du Pyla, which now formed such a barrier between the ocean and the land. Before Brémontier’s time, the miles and miles of sodden salt pastures supported the local community of marsh-farmers who made their way across their squelchy fields on stilts. But as the revolutionary era evolved, and an appetite for scientific progress increased through the 1700s, les landes began to be viewed as nothing-ground, as wasteland, which needed to be transformed into a productive agricultural purpose.