A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  They climbed past the sitting room and lay amongst the shadows on her grand-père’s high bed, wooden shutters flung open but barely letting in any light. She had continued with her memories of the old man, giving herself over entirely now to a nostalgia which afterwards she would come to view as symbiotic with their sex. Francis listened, pent-up but in heaven, trying to disguise the ruckle in his Fletcher Jones trousers.

  Before long Mathilde’s descent from cultural urgency into regional nostalgia was transposed into their mutual desire for each other. For a time, though, they continued to fuel this desire by masking it with the charms of a rustic past, which they could still smell in the mill: the leather of a bellows, the deep irregular sills, the musty rugs, the silt and sedge of the salt pastures that stretched from where they lay, beyond the leadlight of the windows, to the shores of the bassin. They were freed by the atmosphere to recount stories of home and childhood, FB even venturing briefly into a fishing anecdote from a long-ago spring. So May was November, she remembered. Yes, his world was upside down, and that’s when she silenced him with her lips.

  Now Mathilde’s skirt rode up above her knees, one of which she threw across FB’s midriff as their conversation ended. He did not know how experienced Mathilde was, but he knew that he most certainly was not. She sensed as much and he felt it excited her more. In truth, she had had sex with her cousin Michel at Cap Ferret on the far side of the bassin a number of times before she left for Paris. She had kissed Georges, too, in her apartment on Rue Monge when she first met him, before she knew what a pretentious boy he was, but that was all. Her red hair fell across FB’s face with the wild undulance of the garden.

  He felt like he might implode but she coaxed his tongue into her mouth as a temporary release. Their mouths twirled and adventured. He began to seek her out too, her under-curve and then her hard nipples. As her fingers roamed inside his shirt, he grew consciously embarrassed by how his singlet spoke of his life in Geelong. It was hot, after all, even if it wasn’t as stifling as Paris; it was too hot for a singlet. He quickly shed his own habit. There was a rumour that somewhere deep in the past his own Herschell ancestors had originally emigrated from western France to Ireland, but it was pale Irish-Corio skin that now became exposed in the brain of the mill. His cock chafed as she kissed his chest as lightly as the fluttery wings of a willie wagtail.

  When he entered her underpants with his hand she grew serious. Even sombre. The mood deepened and he slid his forefinger easily between the slick of her lips but dared not go inside her. She kissed him harder now, as if the tragic star that momentarily hovered above Paris could only be understood through this immersion in the transience of sensations. With one hand she began unbuttoning her own blouse. He began to help her. Her eyes caught his. His fumbling fingers confirmed his innocence. This was no game, no sparring or jousting. He had travelled for sand but this was what he had really travelled for, and he knew, in a moment so fleeting that he barely noticed it, that this single glowing grain of time had just changed him.

  One moment we are ascending, a million separate cells abuzz and seeking. The next we become unified, the particular singularities that we are.

  Sensing his disillusion she burrowed into him. Soon her hand was there on his zip and springing him free. Dim shadows oxidised, vapours trailed, sharding darkness to emotional light. She longed to mount and have him go into her.

  He tugged at her underpants and released her. Down she went until she rose up again, this time pendulous, freckled and grinning. Looking straight into his eyes she wore him like a polyp, a sleeving thing, so easy. Her skin went pale as she shimmered like silk. When finally he sought her hilt she fell towards him in gusts. Tightly they clenched, closing into one form like the two living halves of a shell. Then they laughed and exhaled.

  12

  Dérive

  Gascony rainwater hissed on the wood stove downstairs. Outside the mill stood an Occitan tank, all stippled and worn but well made, into which Mathilde’s grand-père used to pump water from a well in the garden. But from the yard now the water ran pressured through the taps over the sink, like news channelling through a radio. She filled the teapot and placed it on the stove she’d lit when she first came down, humming ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ as she did so.

  FB lay upstairs, in a mood halfway between bliss and stupefaction. He could not have cared less if she became pregnant; they could shack up in le moulin grand-père and run charter boats out into the Atlantic. He would gain a second education amongst her father’s books and all would be well.

  And to think they’d only just arrived.

  He was due at Lacombe’s hotel at 7 pm for dinner and a quick preliminary discussion on what they would encounter the following day, though nothing with Lacombe ever happened that quickly. Still, he could drink a coffee with Mathilde, borrow her bicycle, and cycle the three kilometres around the port of La Teste-de-Buch into Arcachon to meet his professor. Mathilde had assured him that her parents wouldn’t think him rude. He was working, studying, he’d come from the other side of the world. From miles beneath their feet, in fact. There would be time to meet them properly in the next couple of days.

  When he came downstairs she was smoking a cigarette in the open doorway, under the skewed lintel. It was the only source of light on the ground floor. FB reached for his suitcase so he could change, and as he leant over she reached across and placed the cigarette in his mouth. He inhaled, she withdrew it from his lips. She told him that she liked his lips very much and stared at them now, with extra intensity. They drank coffee while twining their fingers across the dark wood of the round table.

  †

  Before FB left the house he had the opportunity to meet Mathilde’s mother, who entered the garden through a back gate just as he and Mathilde were emerging. Madame Soubret, a short, strong-looking woman, stood frowning at them with a wooden bucket full of oysters in one hand and the bright sleeve of an LP in the other. She wore a denim shirt and unusual pantaloon-style trousers which buttoned just below the knee, leaving exposed thick and tanned calves.

  Mathilde was certainly not effusive at the sight of her mother but nevertheless they embraced and Francis Herschell, the young Australian civil engineer, was introduced. ‘Il est là pour étudier les dunes,’ Mathilde told her mother, who managed to smile politely while raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Un grand sujet,’ she observed.

  Mathilde turned to FB with amusement on her face. ‘She says the dunes are a rather endless field of interest.’

  FB was already smiling, having understood the sardonic nature of what was said. Now though, he lowered his eyebrows and creased his brow. Turning to Madame Soubret (there was no ‘please call me Madeleine’) he nodded and said, ‘Oui, oui, ils sont.’

  †

  A few minutes later, when he was cycling alone towards Arcachon and the Hotel Loup Garou, FB noted the way the resinous pines that lined his route gave way on the high ground of the Ville d’Hiver above Arcachon to stately elms and oaks. He dismounted halfway up the ascent and caught his breath. He looked back down the Avenue Leon Gambetta over the beachfront streets of Arcachon, across the stately nineteenth-century promenade and jetty beyond the post office and across the water rushing back into the bassin between Arcachon and the low-lying peninsula of Cap Ferret. These were Mathilde’s home waters, and he saw too how the bassin bore no small resemblance to his own Corio Bay back home. On the lookout for convergences, he made quick topographical calculations comparing the Bellarine Peninsula with Cap Ferret. He concluded that although Port Phillip and Corio represented a larger scale indent into the ocean coast of Bass Strait, they were nevertheless of the same geomorphological stamp. This surprised him, and had the added bonus of making him feel somehow more at home amidst the revolutions of his heart. He resolved to discuss this issue with the professor with respect to the application in Victoria of the dune stabilisation methods used in A
rcachon and Cap Ferret. To the eye of the novice, at least – for that’s what FB was at this stage – the similarities between the Southern and Atlantic oceans pounding the shores of the coasts protecting the bays of Port Phillip and Arcachon had to suggest the potential of shared physical applications. It was clear that the velocity of the tides was a factor of considerable differentiation, but even so he found a certain mirroring effect involving treacherous waters issuing through a narrow indentation in the land uncanny.

  Turning away from the view, adjusting the satchel on his shoulder, he continued pushing the bicycle up the hill. Three-quarters of the way up he veered right into Avenue Victor Hugo, and after another few hundred metres or so of the shaded tranquillity of oaks and elms he found the Loup Garou set back in a garden on the high side of the road.

  The hotel was tall and striped in coloured stone. He climbed the steps and, entering the foyer, found the professor waiting for him, dressed in a light brown summer suit and looking relaxed despite the long drive. He greeted his student warmly and suggested they take an aperitif in the front lounge.

  To FB’s great surprise the front lounge of the Loup Garou was a room almost entirely given over to the cartography of the Bassin d’Arcachon. Amongst comfortable couches and chaise longues dotted around a mosaic floor, the professor chose a small table from where they looked through large windows across the botanical slopes of the Ville d’Hiver and over Arcachon and the bay to Cap Ferret. Immediately the view captivated FB and his satisfaction was quickly trebled as he noticed the array of framed local maps adorning the walls. His eyes were widening as he took them in and, looking on, the professor smiled at his obvious pleasure.

  ‘Alors, through the windows we have the subject in nature and on the walls its strata of cultural interpretation.’

  FB nodded slowly, also with a smile. ‘I see,’ he said, dumbfounded.

  A waiter appeared at their table, and after a brief consultation the professor ordered a glass of orange wine for them both.

  Even at such a distance (the hotel must have been some three kilometres as the crow flies from the shore), FB could see through the windows the hydraulic heft of the tide pouring into the bassin from the Atlantic. Lacombe began to relate the tragedy of lou gran malhour of 1836, when almost the entire fishing fleet of Arcachon and La Teste-de-Buch had lost their lives trying to re-enter the passes of the bassin in a wild Palm Sunday storm. As FB looked out at the water, small boats were beating both ways in the current, seemingly at the mercy of the tide. It was easy to visualise how precarious the passes into the bay might become in even stronger weather.

  As it was the early evening was mild. When the wine arrived Professor Lacombe got up from his chair and motioned for FB to do the same. Walking over to the eastern wall he began to point out the rationale of each different map of the bassin. Some of these were copies of maps of great antiquity; there was even a diagram of the bay’s contours dating from 1302.

  The maps included outlines of the Arcachon town plan, overviews of the shores of the bassin, and were, as the professor pointed out, invaluable for the changes they showed. Some also included the Dune du Pyla, which stood approximately three kilometres south of the hotel. It was notable for how little it had changed compared to the rest of the bassin. On most of the maps Pyla remained a solid, rectangular wedge at the southern mouth of the bay, and even as the sands of the treacherous passes leading into the bassin shifted about in time, the Grande Dune stood almost like a disconnected entity, piled up grain by grain like a bookend of the bay.

  The professor then led FB to the western wall of the lounge where, along with more maps of the bassin, were hung many historical photographs and postcards of Arcachon, La Teste, the Dune du Pyla and Cap Ferret. FB’s eye was immediately drawn to a sepia postcard of two ‘parqueuses’, or oyster women, standing amongst the racks at low tide wearing the same style of pantaloons that Mathilde’s mother had been wearing back at the mill. When he mentioned this, the professor raised his eyebrows and remarked that the parqueuses were well and truly a thing of the past.

  What the professor wanted to show FB on the western wall, however, was not the postcards and early photographs but a series of charts mapping the sand forms of the passes over the course of the centuries.

  ‘When I first stayed here,’ Lacombe told FB, ‘it was 1952. The Ville d’Hiver was still somewhat stigmatised by the tubercular reputation it had acquired during the years when Arcachon was viewed as a climatotherapeutic destination. This room of maps fascinated me and of course is the reason I continue to insist on staying here, despite the expense, whenever I am in the area. After I had been here a number of times and got to know Monsieur Draguignan, who had single-handedly researched and curated the objects in this room, I was audacious enough to suggest to him that the sand diagrams of the area which I had discovered in the archive in Paris would make an appropriate addition. Monsieur Draguignan agreed to view them and so, when I returned to Paris, I spent a series of enjoyable evenings composing decorative copies of them in my flat. When Draguignan saw them he was delighted, and so, happily, here they are.’

  These charts of the passes were mounted in a grid of nine squares, three across and three down, each of which contained a depiction of the indentation into the Atlantic coast. The first image, in the top left-hand corner, was from the 1300s. It depicted the ancient river Leyre, which caused the coastal indentation in the first place. The last image, in the bottom right-hand corner, showed the bassin as it existed in 1965, just three years before Lacombe and FB Herschell stood inspecting the charts in the map room of the Hotel Loup Garou.

  Lacombe had hand-inked the hydrological maps in a scientifically accurate but nevertheless pleasantly ornamental fashion, in order that they would be in keeping with Draguignan’s rather sumptuous room. Thus, the sandbanks in each of the images were represented in a pale apple-green, the dunes in an apricot-tinted yellow, and the water in off-white. The currents and directions of the channel flows were inked in what FB would have called royal blue but which could fairly be described as a traditional Arcachonaise blue. Each shape or outline, including the dune heads and the banks of sand within the mouth of the inlet, were bordered with a delicate thin line of bright orange Indian ink.

  The earliest image, of the Leyre in full flow, like all the subsequent images, was a morphological estimate based on the navigational and hydrological maps kept by the Société Historique et Archeologique d’Arcachon. These estimates were made by the Bordelaise hydrographer Jean-Pasquale Mosquito. Mosquito’s earliest image showed the Leyre with its wide mouth opening directly westwards into the ocean, its flow only obstructed by small islands of sand spaced at flotilla-like intervals between its banks.

  The second image, which estimated the contours of the bassin some three hundred years after the first image, showed how the southern dune head had encroached to the north, obscuring the wide opening so that, with the fingerish tip of Cap Ferret reaching down from the north, it begins to resemble the treacherous mouth of the bay as it was in 1968.

  The third image, the last in the top row and dated around 1400, showed the southern dune head changing shape so that it extended further to the east in a bulb-like peninsula, further narrowing the channel between the northern and southern dunes.

  In the first image of the second row, dated at 1708, were visible the consolidations of the original smaller island in the Leyre into what was now called the Île aux Oiseaux, or Island of Birds. This was set back deep into the bassin from the heads and began to create the two-channel formation of the modern era. Importantly, this chart of 1708 was also the first in the sequence to depict the massive Dune du Pyla in the southern head, which formed as a direct consequence of the onshore westerlies blowing sand from a low tide bank, now known as the Banc d’Arguin, across to the eastern shore. In this 1708 image the Banc d’Arguin had still not fully severed from the coast proper but nevertheless had begun to form a f
ish-hook shape running north-east to south-west, which ultimately saw the belly of the hook eroded and the bank left as a separate entity in the passes.

  In the following image, from 1829, the Banc d’Arguin had broken off from the shore and, with the curl of Cap Ferret further eastwards across the entrance, began to show the passes that had claimed so many lives just seven years later in the lou gran malhour.

  By 1912, FB saw, a pattern was beginning to emerge between the northern and southern channels, which narrowed and widened in alternate fashion. By this time, of course, Arcachon was well into its aristocratic heyday and the interests of developers and industrialists had begun to conflict with those of the local fishing community. Time and again during the period between the charts of 1829 and 1912, the fishing community insisted to the entrepreneurs that the ephemerality of the passes was such that Arcachon could never, as they dreamt, be transformed into France’s largest industrial port. Time and again the developers refused to listen. Inevitably, the fishermen and women were proven correct and chart by chart on the wall of the map room in the Loup Garou displayed concrete evidence of the treacherous facts. By 1965, the date of the final image, in the bottom right-hand corner of the grid, the Banc d’Arguin had reduced somewhat in size and the northern channel by Cap Ferret had become almost impassable. On the southern shore, however, the Dune du Pyla just continued to grow, courtesy of Brémontier’s plantings and the velocity of the tides exposing the sand of the Banc d’Arguin every six hours to the scouring Atlantic westerlies.

  The professor proudly pointed out how the sand charts he had copied so expertly during those long evenings in Paris were a representation of the key determining factors of the evolution of the town of Arcachon, with its many and complex layers of fishing, climate therapy, casino tourism and so on. ‘Arcachon has a distinct and deservedly famous human culture,’ Lacombe declared to FB with a steady look, ‘but at heart it is all about the passes and the sand.’