A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  Bill McCormick quoting from Stuart Zane Charme on Sartre

  clastic/clast – from Greek klastos: broken in pieces

  †

  Once he’d returned to Paris at the end of May he set out immediately for the metro to find Mathilde. Paris was a different city now; the temper had passed, order had been restored to the streets and the bus timetable. Only occasionally could a stray cobble be seen, a rough hemisphere of stones still disassembled. De Gaulle had called elections for the last week of June. Commerce had resumed, though now with hopes for a pay rise in the pressured hearts of workers. The scholars resumed study for their exams, just as on the heights of the Pyrenees wind and gravitational impulses ground the edifices of the earth into tiny airborne grains destined for swirling sorrel streams which would ultimately find their way to the Atlantic coast.

  He had caught the metro as far as Cluny – La Sorbonne then walked. A block north of Mathilde’s apartment building he took a breath over a cup of tea in a brasserie. He noted the subsidence of urgency in the air on Saint-Germain, then too as he crossed the market stalls and passed into Rue Monge. He felt this change of air as an awful vanishing, an inexplicable disappearance, as if he were missing a limb. This is a common enough metaphor for the pain of unrequited or disappearing love. A re-ignition of the city’s revolution was not, after all, what he was committed to.

  Stirring the tea he had a familiar feeling, but one that lessened over the weeks and months: he felt too Australian. With Mathilde, during those final hours before they had left the city, it had been possible to have fun with this hick-ish feeling. She had accepted him, he knew that, and he was also prepared to believe that she even loved him. He felt he carried something of the tides and their reality with him and then, at the Cap Ferret lighthouse, high up with the Fresnel lens as Pierre Green showed them the bird’s-eye view over the dunes of the Bassin d’Arcachon, he felt somehow deeply native to the subject of their interest. The knowledge of sand and shore was a universal language, and he felt he was gathering a fluent tongue. But now, back in the city where such littoral openings could be found only in the imagination, and with the awful and pathetic loneliness of his rejection somehow exposed by the light pouring into the broad boulevard, he felt an acid emptiness, as if his own better self had been gnarled by the dry horizontality of the land from which he came.

  Mathilde’s apartment at 40 Rue Monge was across the street and some hundred metres further along from the brasserie. He was close, but the closer he got the stranger he became. His self-consciousness tightened, the repressions of his plain and conservative upbringing re-gripped him. His tea grew cold.

  Approaching Mathilde’s building soon afterwards he realised he didn’t have the code to open the door to the street. Above him the sky seemed to darken with the utter haplessness of this realisation, as if a southern crag had leant in over Paris to frown at him.

  It began to rain. He crossed back over Rue Monge and waited under the burgundy awning of a florist. He knew nothing of what her movements would be, the rhythm of her days, and yet his only hope was to intercept her. But how, in all that time, and all that space?

  After an hour in the cold, with the colour of the awning gradually deepening with the rain, he felt entirely bereft. He could not stand the situation any longer, and strode away in the direction of the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  In Rue des Quatre-Vents a half-hour later he found the Galerie Sarcon closed. There was no reason for her to be there – he knew that the Mondrian exhibition was now over – unless of course she was hoping to see him.

  Under the cobblestone lies . . .

  †

  The aperçus and aphorisms in the margins of his charts, diagrams and calculations, along with the things that simply occurred to him as he went along (such as the fact that the dune situation of Cap Ferret could almost be transferrable to those Mondrian painted at Domburg) began to form a telling relationship with the main body of his technical research as I explored the archive.

  Data obtained at Blakeney in Norfolk by the writer showed that the first 7cms of a dune soil contained b/w 1184 and 8032 rabbit droppings per sq mtr, but in fact, although this appears large, it only represents an annual addition of about 0.18% by weight to the soil. More significant is the fact that these rabbit droppings decay very slowly and represent localised centres of high water-retaining capacity into which the roots penetrate and are especially exploited by them.

  Edward Salisbury, Downs and Dunes

  Apollo had granted him the gift of understanding nature’s voices and likewise of realising when speech was pointless.

  Roberto Calasso

  After a time, the two components, the cultural reflections and the geomorphological statistics, began to seem themselves like the ocean and shore. But was it the objective coolness of the dune-form analyses, the sand-drift graphs and the wind-vector diagrams that were the ocean, or was the ocean best represented by the sad wisdoms of Camus as he tried to negotiate a path of dignity inside the mess that was French colonialism?

  For us, it is clear that the only nationalism at issue here is the nationalism of sunshine.

  Albert Camus

  And was it the accumulative effect of FB’s sand-themed metaphors that best represented the beach and hummocky dunes, or was this better expressed by the cumulative piles of statistics resulting from the persistence of his daily observations? I remembered FB laughing in the bookshop one day as he suggested, rather enigmatically, that if you swapped space for time the work of some writers was like a king tide that encompassed and flooded a whole era. He said Proust was one such writer. In England, he believed, Virginia Woolf was too. And Joyce in Ireland. I mention this to demonstrate that he was not above (or below) employing the analogy of the tides even in conversation. When you spend your life inspecting the zone between the tides, or merely inspecting the inspections, as I have been doing, the constant roll and lunar cycle of ebb and flow which is the signature of the territory becomes in itself a way of seeing the world. For instance, I know surfers who argue that the dynamic beach breaks on the Atlantic coast of France create a different type of person to the long swelling incubations we endure here along the Great Ocean Road. This is ethnological, of course, the species as environment, but it applies – whether it be to the civil engineer, the writer or surfer. Or the lover, for that matter.

  Thus Mathilde’s disappearance is everywhere underneath FB’s papers from 1968 on.

  †

  In the three weeks between his arrival back in Paris and the French elections of 23 and 30 June, FB struggled with the polarity of Professor Lacombe’s renewed enthusiasm for the internationalisation of his dune research and his own feelings of disorientation at walking the streets of the city without Mathilde. Like a tourist of his own heart’s geography, he visited Saint-Sulpice, the Galerie Sarcon, even the tabac at Clamart where they had opened the door for the bird in the cage. At Saint-Sulpice he found no black telephone on a tree stump but rather the tidied grey place ringed with green buses and grey pigeons. The stump itself had been removed. At the Galerie Sarcon he found the dunes of Mondrian replaced with the self-portraits of an Alsatian painter, Gilles Clairvaux. Although he liked Clairvaux’s gentle pictures, they made no real impression on him at all. How could they? Likewise, FB himself seemed to have made little impression on the city; he was not recognised at the gallery nor, of course, at the Clamart tabac, where he bought a pack of Gauloises to the haunting tune of the canary’s trill. The singing bird clashed with the deathly silence in his heart. It grated and he rushed out of the shop so abruptly that he nearly knocked over an old Spaniard with a walking stick who was coming to buy his daily paper. FB apologised profusely in English, his French momentarily deserting him. The Spaniard was taken aback and quite obviously annoyed.

  He also walked all the way along the Boulevard Saint-Michel to Place Denfert-Rochereau, completing the course of the 13 May
march which he had abandoned on the Pont Saint-Michel. He doesn’t say so in his diaries, but perhaps he felt that if he finally completed the route of the demonstration his fate would somehow be redeemed and Mathilde would appear, walking across the hemi-stitch of the cobbles, a book under her arm, a smile on her lips? It wasn’t to be. When he arrived in the wide place the traffic seemed coarse and the bustle of the city’s inhabitants impervious. He stood for a time as if in an ocean maelstrom, staring at the grandiloquent still point of the grey lion in the heart of the square, before turning left down Boulevard Arago and heading for the river.

  On 14 June, after a lonely fortnight of wandering and study, he felt his luck might have changed. While heading out to a lecture at the School of Mines he saw Mathilde’s friend Gilles talking with a group of people on the steps of the church at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He had never been introduced to Gilles but had seen him from a distance with Mathilde on the day that Lacombe and he had picked her up at Rue Monge when they were heading for the dunes. If he had felt a pang of jealousy then, he felt only hope now as suddenly a lifeline appeared between Mathilde’s life and his own.

  Stopping in his tracks he waited for Gilles and his little group to disperse. Despite the warm summer air it was quiet in the square, with no-one much about. But Gilles and his friends were animated.

  Eventually, what FB hoped would happen did, and the two men and one young woman Gilles had been conversing with all kissed him on both cheeks then set off past Les Deux Magots and along Saint-Germain. Gilles, on the other hand, turned right and walked off across the place towards the river along Rue Bonaparte – but not before glancing at FB standing alone only twenty metres away. Their eyes met briefly. Before FB could raise a hand to indicate his need to talk, Gilles had hurried off in the other direction.

  FB followed him at a distance along Rue Bonaparte and then along the river to the Quai de Conti. It did occur to him, as he observed the curly-black-haired student from behind, that he may have got the wrong person. Could love be playing a trick on him? He was self-aware enough to consider that his desperate need to reconnect with Mathilde could have affected his judgement. And yet he continued to put one foot in front of the other and carried on following the other man anyway.

  Beyond the Rue des Beaux-Arts the young student had reached the Quai Malaquais and turned right. At the Place de L’Institut he stopped to cross the road and continued walking amongst the bouquinistes along the riverbank. It was as he stopped to look at some magazines at one of these stalls that FB caught a fresh view of the student’s profile. He felt sure that the man holding up the copy of Empédocle was Mathilde’s friend. But then again, had Mathilde’s friend worn those black-framed spectacles? FB couldn’t be sure.

  He was like one of Maigret’s young offsiders (though a rather indecisive one) as he followed the student fossicking along the riverbank stalls. When Gilles picked up a Frantz Fanon book and delved into his pocket for the francs to pay for it, FB felt that was confirmation enough to take the plunge. Hadn’t Mathilde and her father been discussing Fanon at La Teste-de-Buch?

  He hastened to the young man’s side.

  ‘Hello. Vous êtes un ami de Mathilde Soubret?’

  The student looked surprised, perhaps too surprised to answer.

  ‘Moi aussi,’ FB went on. ‘Mathilde a parlé de vous. You are Gilles, no?’

  This time the student nodded, but slowly, silently.

  FB was overjoyed. ‘Je la cherche,’ he said. And then in English: ‘I am trying to get in touch with her.’

  Now Gilles raised his eyebrows a little. ‘You don’t have her address, her telephone number?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, her address, yes, but not her number.’

  ‘Do you study with her?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Are you with the CGT? You don’t look like you’re with the FLN.’

  FB sensed an undercurrent of hostility now. Did it have something to do with political allegiances?

  ‘No, no,’ he said, smiling. ‘I have just recently been with her in Arcachon. With her family. I could not return with her to Paris because of my studies but now that I am here I would like to see her.’

  Gilles frowned, perhaps sensing that the explanation given by FB wasn’t quite true. He slipped the Fanon book and also the copy of Empédocle into his satchel. FB suspected that he was stealing the latter. Somehow Gilles gave the impression of thinking fast as he put the books away.

  ‘Well,’ he said, fastening his satchel strap, ‘I don’t have Mathilde’s number with me. But I’d be happy to give it to you. We could meet later on. I have to go now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ FB said. ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  ‘Okay. Seven o’clock at the Brasserie les Arènes on Rue Linné. You know it?’

  ‘Yes. Between Jussieu and the Jardin.’

  ‘Exactement.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  ‘Yes. Okay.’

  †

  It seems true that FB’s temperament, his interests, not to mention the sheer capacity of his mind had isolated him even in childhood, but now when I think of the air of solitude he always had about him in the bookshop and on those other occasions when I spoke with him, it is not that childhood isolation that I think about; it is simply the young FB standing under a blood-coloured awning across the road from 40 Rue Monge. It is also the young FB on the lonely trek from his lodgings in the fifth arrondissement to his classes with Professor Lacombe. And, finally, it is FB as he waits at an outdoor table at the Brasserie les Arènes on Rue Linné for Mathilde’s friend to arrive and give him her number.

  He admits in his diary that his hopes were high – so high, in fact, that he had convinced himself that Gilles might even arrange for Mathilde to come along to Rue Linné also. But seven o’clock went by without a sign of either of them, then seven thirty, then seven forty-five. From where he sat he could see the tall black and gold gates of the Jardin des Plantes and he began to feel as lonely as the small group of wallabies that lived in an enclosure there behind the gates.

  He drank two coffees and two glasses of Bourgueil. At least the wallabies had each other. At 9 pm, when he paid his bill, the brasserie was full of students laughing and carousing but it might as well have been full of sand. Sand up to the ceiling. He felt as if he might choke from the utter aridity of his situation. He felt duped, terribly alone. He moved away from the brasserie, with sand spilling from his tweedy cuffs. He stepped out onto the street. He walked along to the gates of the gardens, knowing they’d be shut. As he looked in through the vertical columns between the bars the entire garden, its furry leaves, its humid stench, its republican canopy of tendrils and branches, seemed to tilt towards him. The whole of Paris now felt like a dark carnival. Lurid and fickle. Distraught, he turned and walked away.

  Four

  17

  Rhizome

  In the week after FB died I dreamt that all the signs along the Great Ocean Road, the speed limit signs, the give way signs, the signs indicating the danger of landslips and seasonal waterfalls, the no-camping, no-alcohol and no-sleeping-in-your-car signs, the Welcome to Lorne, Wye River, Apollo Bay etc. signs, and all the simple creek and place signs in between, including the signs warning motorists to watch out for crossing echidnas, koalas and kangaroos, were all painted black in honour of his memory. I think now of those funereal roadside blanks with an immense wistfulness due to their purely imaginary nature. How I wish I lived in a society that could honour its dead with such simple but momentous gestures. No words needed, no sculptures in totalitarian bronze, no sentimental caricatures, just a colour. A colour repeated. A colour to take away the hyperbole, to take away the caution and fear, the do’s and dont’s, the directions for how life should be lived and at what speed. All this replaced by a deeply quiet emotion.

  In the end that is what it is about FB that has compelled me to linger for so lon
g amongst his things: that deeply quiet emotion.

  If you had spent decades chronicling the movement of sand, ostensibly in order to control that movement, you might in the end begin to wonder what it is about the human species that feels the need to organise nature so. Surely a desire to travel unimpeded in vehicles from A to B could not be the only justification for an obsessive alteration of organic forms? And yet the Victorian Country Roads Board would have it so. There, upon his return from France, FB Herschell sat, year after year, in the McKillop Street office, attempting to widen the parameters of the intellection of sand. He well understood the public purpose of his activities, but there was a private universe in them as well. And in that private universe was a city of his imagination, a city at night, where the tall elegant gates of the Jardin des Plantes slowly opened onto a humid darkness. A slow and stately music played in his mind as FB crept in amongst the shadows of the foliage to find the exiled wallabies on their little patch of manicured lawn. It is there that he dreamt himself laying down to sleep.

  There, behind the barriers of the enclosure, behind the lined graphs and white charts, the ant-like statistics, the wind-vector diagrams and annotated directives, lies the scene: the quiet sadness of an Australian man, the tragic dignity of his inability to express it in any other way.

  †

  The initial obstacle FB encountered on his return was Gibbon’s stubborn refusal to let him return to the part of the coast that had set him out on his course overseas in the first place. FB was told upon his return to work at the CRB office that the ongoing problem of Mr Lane’s long beach road between Anglesea and the Split Point cliffs could wait, as could the situation at Eastern View. ‘There’s more pressing work out the back of Barwon Heads,’ Gibbon declared. ‘It’ll certainly be the test of any expertise you’ve picked up from the French.’