by Julia Stuart
‘Forgive me, Guillaume,’ he called out as the barber approached, panting. ‘Blame my wife. She said that everyone was trying out this new barber in Brantôme who knew all the latest styles. I was quite happy with the way you always cut it, but she said I had to go as it was she who had to look at me all the time.’
‘What’s it called?’ asked the barber.
‘The forelock,’ replied the fifty-eight-year-old, looking at him with his right eye, his left covered by a long flop of hair stretching from as far back as his crown.
As Guillaume Ladoucette sat in front of his bowl of cassoulet, remembering the sight of Gilbert Dubuisson’s freckled scalp earlier that day, he thought of all his other regulars who had deserted him on account of having gone bald due to their advancing years. Despite employing his best salesman’s techniques, he had only managed to convince four of them to wear a hairpiece. Again he wondered whether he should move with the times and learn the pine cone and the forelock. But such monstrosities went against everything he had learnt. Anyone who had read the Périgord Academy of Master Barbers’ Revised Guide to the Art of Barbering, Second Edition, would know only too well that each hairstyle should represent a work of art which emphasized the best features of the customer in order to make them look more attractive for their age, weight and height. He just couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it. The barber then counted up how many regulars he had left and thought of the letters from the bank asking him to come in for a talk that he had ignored. As Guillaume Ladoucette realized that his days as a barber were over, the tear on his chin dropped to the floor.
3
A BREEZE SNIFFED ROUND THE ADJUSTABLE SIGN AT THE ENTRANCE to the village that read: ‘Slow Down! There Are Only 33 of Us’. A day never passed without a wind blowing. None of the myopic meteorologists from Paris who made regular visits to the tiny community in the north-western tip of the Périgord Vert could agree on a cause for the curious microclimate. Some in the surrounding hamlets pointed to the gusts as an explanation for the reputation of the place, for wind was widely accepted as a cause of madness.
There were numerous explanations as to how the village came to be called Amour-sur-Belle, only one of which was true. Belle, as everyone correctly pointed out, was the name of the river that lolloped its way through. It wasn’t much of a river, no wider in places than Stéphane Jollis was tall, a fact noted by those who happened to see the baker fall in while picking wild mint one afternoon. He lay for several minutes unable to move, his giant stomach sticking out of the clear water like a half-moon. The sight was so arresting it took a while for those on the bridge to stop staring and help the man get back up on to his ridiculously small feet.
Lisette Robert the midwife had insisted that the name referred to the love that permeated generations of her family, one of the oldest in the village, until it was pointed out that her great-great-grandmother had pushed her great-great-grandfather down a well after he had shown his donkey too much of the wrong sort of affection; that one of her uncles had never lived with the mother of their five children as she smelt too fiercely; and that Lisette Robert herself, who was a widow, hadn’t even come close to finding love again, despite her unrivalled beauty.
Gilbert Dubuisson claimed that the village was named after St Amour. According to the postman, the fifteenth-century former heretic converted to Christianity on seeing the beauty of the place, which he insisted could only be God-given, and went on to found a monastery in the nearby woods. He stuck by the story even when it was pointed out to him that the village had never been anything to look at; that the only remains of a construction in the woods was a battered old hunters’ shed, which concealed the frantic throes of adulterous affairs; and that had the village such a close association with Christianity its inhabitants would surely be of a far higher moral standing.
The truth was that Amour-sur-Belle was named after Marcus Damour, a Roman soldier who left the army claiming tempestuous bowels in order to fight for the Gauls, as he had heard that their food supplies were better. After fathering six ugly children, he went on to cultivate in the fields around the village a mysterious new crop that his compatriots had brought with them from Italy. It produced bunches of red or green berries which, when crushed, fermented and drunk, proved to have a remarkable ability to improve the inhabitants’ mood. Recaptured by the Romans while working on his vines one morning, Damour was found guilty of desertion and crucified.
Damour’s fatal mistake was to have settled in a village frequented by Romans marching between Angoulême and Périgueux. Intolerable numbers would stop, lured by its fountain which was widely believed to cure gout. The inhabitants, fed up of soldiers soaking their pestilent feet in their drinking water, eventually put the word out that it also cured lively libidos, which immediately put a stop to the visitors and their mouldy sandals. But the villagers’ torment was far from over. For, when the area succumbed to Christianity, the miraculous fountain was dedicated to St Pierre, and once a year the place was overrun by pilgrims whose personal habits were even more pernicious.
There was one brief moment of glory in the village’s ignoble history. Before Napoleon left for his Russian campaign, he asked the owners of the local forges, including that of Amour-sur-Belle, to produce his cannons, an honour so great it made the inhabitants who worked there tremble with pride. Before leaving, he handed out a scattering of IOUs and ennoblements to the forge owners. But, after failing in Russia, the emperor refused to pay his debts and they were ruined. The peasants returned to their crops cursing the short general and wrapped themselves in their familiar cloaks of misery.
The inhabitants trembled once more, this time with fear, when men arrived in 1936 with their horses and carts to install the first electricity pylons. They trembled again, with excitement, when they returned in their vans in 1967 to lay the pipes for running water, after which turning on a tap remained a novelty for several years.
Amour-sur-Belle’s questionable looks worsened with time. A community with four times its current population a generation ago, eleven of its deserted houses had since slumped to their knees in despair. Several stone barns, their doors long rotted away, stood throttled by an infestation of weeds, their walls gripped with bone-coloured ivy that had long ago given up the will to live. The village no longer even had a stone cross, it having been removed the previous century by the diocese who thought the place no longer worthy after a morose resident knifed her husband to death, unable to bear the agony of seeing his contentment.
However, its humble appearance worked in its favour, for the English considered the place far too ugly to colonize. As a result, Amour-sur-Belle enjoyed the distinction of being the only place for kilometres inhabited solely by natives. Visitors were also scarce. Most tourists who happened to come across its forlorn château, which had changed hands eight times between the French and English during the Hundred Years War, and whose ramparts with their missing sections of crenellations were too scandalous to warrant the place a mention in the guidebooks, simply carried on driving.
There was a time when the residents of Amour-sur-Belle tried to pass the place off as a town in the hope of securing more amenities from the local authority. Yves Lévèque, who had always fancied a municipal swimming pool, despite the fact that he was the only person who could afford one of his own, wrote a letter to the council stating that following a particularly cold winter the village had experienced a population explosion. Not only that, but many outsiders had suddenly noticed the unrivalled charms of Amour-sur-Belle and had made it their home. Within weeks the dentist received a reply stating that the first stage of any alteration to the status of the village would be a population headcount, for which a date had been set for two months’ time. Letters were hastily sent across the country to relatives who hadn’t received a Christmas card for years, inviting them for a visit and indicating the precise date when the offer was open. A note was also despatched to a great-aunt in Newfoundland and a telegram to a second cousin in Swansea.
When the day of the headcount arrived, however, the population had swelled by just two people. His plans in tatters, Yves Lévèque rushed to the barber shop and asked Guillaume Ladoucette for all the wigs, false beards, moustaches and sideburns that he possessed. The dentist struggled out with a large cardboard box and distributed its contents amongst the villagers. When the man from the council arrived, he discovered a surprisingly hirsute population. As he walked around the village with his clipboard, he suddenly came across a resident standing on the church steps, panting. He had exactly the same features and attire as the man who had just been sitting outside the Bar Saint-Jus. The only difference between the two was that the first man was totally bald. But what astonished the official most was that some of the gentlemen with the longest beards undeniably had breasts. By the time he had finished his count, the population of Amour-sur-Belle, many of whom, he noted, were desperately short of breath and suffered from chronic perspiration, stood at 897. That evening, a victorious Yves Lévèque started asking around the bar for volunteer lifeguards.
The following Tuesday, however, a second inspector arrived, unannounced. Yves Lévèque, who happened to be attending to his roof at the time, was the first to spot him stalking around the village with his clipboard. Horrified, the dentist shot down his ladder. But in his panic he was unable to remember who had the box of hairpieces that were waiting to be combed out before being returned to the fastidious barber. By the end of the week, a letter arrived at the dentist’s house stating that after two official audits of the population of Amour-sur-Belle, its status would remain unchanged.
Guillaume Ladoucette had just emerged from the woods with the biggest Caesar’s mushroom he had ever picked and was striding back home enjoying the envious glances at its rich orange flesh when he was woken from his dream by the sound of a door banging in the breeze in the street below. The barber remained in exactly the same position, his arms down the sides of his body as if already dead in his coffin, and his eyes closed, desperately trying to get back to the rue du Château so he could arrive back home, put some butter and garlic into a frying pan and allow the flavour to take him to fungal heaven. But it was no use. When he fell back to sleep he found himself standing in front of his barber’s which had been bought by Jean-Baptiste Rigaudie. Stretching out of the door was a queue made up of all his customers who had gone bald, whose hair had suddenly grown back. Those waiting on what was now a red leather banquette were not passing round Petit Beurre Lu biscuits, but were being served little cakes made by Stéphane Jollis, who ignored his friend’s mournful tapping on the window.
Jolted awake by the horrifying spectacle, the barber swung his legs out of bed, settled his feet on the floor and peered cautiously between his ankles. Satisfied that he was alone, he stood up and made his way to the bathroom naked. Slowly, he nudged at the dark wooden door with his toes. Pressing an eye up against the crack between the door and the frame, he surveyed the room. Above the bath taps was a set of shelves bearing a collection of exquisite gentlemen’s soaps. The bottom row was reserved for those he deemed too splendid to use, which were simply taken out of their boxes and sniffed. Next to the taps was a large loofah and a natural sponge containing two chest hairs. Lined up on top of the small marble-topped table by the sink was a razor in its box, a blue shaving mug that had belonged to his father and a badger-hair shaving brush with an ivory handle.
Seeing nothing untoward, he poked his head round the door as an extra precaution. Satisfied that she wasn’t there, he walked in, rested both hands on the sink and raised his eyes to the mirror. The reflection was far from that of a Living Example. The right side of his moustache was thirty degrees higher than the left and urgently needed rewaxing into position. His finger wave had taken on the appearance of a rolling tempest as a result of a night of constant tossing; a portion of it hung down over his left eye and another was stuck to his forehead.
But Guillaume Ladoucette did not pick up the tiny spirit level he used to line up his moustache every morning. Neither did he open the jar of wax, or indeed his pomade the colour of figs. Instead, he put his fingers under the tap, ran them through his hair and wasn’t in the least bit concerned about the lamentable results. Nor did he lift both arms above his head and bring them down majestically in front of him until his palms were flat on the floor, a feat of flexibility he performed daily to stave off the ravages of middle age, and on occasion to impress his contemporaries in the Bar Saint-Jus. Instead, he shuffled back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, his back rounded like the sagging walls of the old rabbit hutches in the back garden. Eventually, he looked around for his clothes, but his trousers hanging in the wardrobe seemed terribly far away. So too did the pile of white cotton underpants next to the rows of neatly paired socks in the top drawer of the dresser. An hour passed before he summoned sufficient will to clamber into a fresh pair of underwear. But once they were in position, his motivation abandoned him again and he pulled on the rest of the clothes he had worn the previous day, which were slumped on the wooden chair next to the wardrobe. He sat down again on the edge of the bed in his work trousers, pierced with tiny fragments of hair that never came out, though he had no intention of going in that day, or any other for that matter. When he could no longer brave the hurricane of his mind stirring up insufferable thoughts of what would become of him, he decided to distract himself with breakfast.
In his bare feet, the barber walked slowly down the creaking wooden stairs, but stopped on the last one. Craning his head forward, he surveyed the sitting room with its boisterous wallpaper, which had once, for a brief and unfortunate moment, been very much in vogue. On top of the back of the brown settee was a plump green velvet cushion against which he rested his head while watching television. Sitting on one of the chair arms was a small glass containing the sticky red residue of homemade pineau. The great pale stone mantelpiece bore a wooden framed clock whose ticking had driven one relative to suicide; above it was mounted his father’s shotgun, which had claimed three wild boars. On the windowsill was the handbell his mother rang in the street during the war whenever De Gaulle had been on the radio from London in order to irritate her neighbours, who were Pétainists. Hanging on the wall next to the door to the kitchen was the calendar the fire brigade sold door-to-door at Christmas, which the barber always bought, hoping it would secure their prompt arrival in the event of a fire. And sitting on the coffee table was nothing more sinister than an old copy of The Lunar Gardener magazine.
Grabbing the handrail, Guillaume Ladoucette slowly crouched down, tipped over to one side and looked underneath the table. Satisfied that he was still alone, he walked through to the kitchen and poked his head round the door. He scanned the tops of the cupboards bearing the casserole dishes in which he hid his valuables; the huge pale stone mantelpiece with its row of old Peugeot coffee grinders; the bamboo coat rail by the door on which was hung his jerkin and a torch; and the cellar door handle which bore a necklace of dried red chillies. Crouching down again, he leant to one side, peered underneath the table and saw nothing other than a fallen walnut kernel.
Unable to eat as his throat was still choked with the bilious fumes of anxiety, he pulled out a chair from under the table and sat down to drink his coffee. Immediately the barber felt something collapse underneath him. He shot horrified to his feet and inspected the red cushion that his grandmother had made. There, crushed into the fabric, were pieces of shell, and smears of egg yolk were rapidly seeping into it. It was then that Guillaume Ladoucette felt something wet against his buttocks. ‘That infernal chicken!’ he cried.
Violette, the infernal chicken, who belonged to Fabrice Ribou the bar owner, had never dared set a scaly red toe in the house while Madame Ladoucette had been living there. But since the old woman had moved to a smaller place, after no longer being able to cope alone in the family home, the bird had taken to entering the house as if she owned the place. Guillaume Ladoucette had tried everything he could think of to get rid of her, shor
t of blasting the bird off his garden wall where she would sit warming her fluffy undercarriage while staring at him. He had even tried locking all the doors and windows whenever he went out, but it was no use. He would return home to find peck marks in his butter, tell-tale four-toed footprints in the talc on the bathroom floor and black-and-white droppings on his freshly washed cotton underpants airing in the cupboard.
After scraping as much egg off the cushion as he could and changing his trousers, the barber left the house, taking care to double lock the front door behind him. He had no idea where he was going. All he knew was that he had to escape the fog of panic swirling around his ankles. But as soon as he started walking, his hurried footsteps simply whipped it up further. As usual Madame Serre, hair the colour of pigeon down and fingers crooked with age, was sitting on a picnic chair in the morning sun outside her front door. But the barber, engulfed in doom, failed to notice his next-door neighbour and walked on by without his usual greeting or enquiring whether there was anything she needed. She watched him disappear up the street, wondering what she had done to offend him and whether wonky moustaches were now the latest fashion.