by Ann Barry
HOUSE RESEARCH
The dictionary’s definition of identity is the “sameness of essential or generic character in different instances.” Yet geographical identity can be an elusive thing. If I were asked in New York where I was from, I would reply, “St. Louis.” If I were somewhere else in the United States and was asked where I was from, I would say New York. But if I were on Mars, it wouldn’t dawn on me to say I was from Carennac, France. For though I now feel at home, I will never feel indigenous. Nor would I ever contemplate moving to France permanently, as people suspect when they discover I have a house there. Eventually I hope to spend more time at Pech Farguet, however. It’s constantly beckoning. As soon as I get back to New York from a trip to France, I’m dreaming and planning of when I can go back.
At some point my two worlds took on a seamlessness. Buying the car contributed to a sense of belonging. I no longer felt like a visitor. Charleston gave me permanence.
Life in New York now flows easily into life in France. I don’t have to make a pack list anymore. It has become routine. About a month or so in advance of a trip, I book the usual Air France flight, leaving Newark on Thursday evening at six-thirty P.M. and returning two weeks later from Orly at ten-thirty A.M. I have figured out how to get to and from the Paris airport for the price of the métro, and know by heart the usual hours for the departures of the train leaving Paris from Austerlitz and returning from St-Denis. The arrangement with Raymond goes like clockwork. My initial feeling of awkwardness and indebtedness to my neighbors has long vanished. We are friends.
And, after twelve years, the house has become like a pair of well-worn shoes that now comfortably fit the contours of my feet. But, unlike a pair of old shoes, Pech Farguet has its own presence and soul. When I close up the house after a visit, I take one last look around and bid a silent good-bye, house. It is a living, breathing sentinel that awaits my return. It saddens me to leave it alone and I fear something will befall it in my absence.
Pech Farguet has eyes and ears, too. And what had it seen and heard in the course of its nearly two-hundred-year history? Whom had it watched come and go before these foreigners—the English couple and now this American? Who had called it home? Finding out who my predecessors were would provide a kind of genealogy: I would know where I came from. And I now felt I owed this house something: honor and respect for what it was.
Since the house is so small, I had imagined it as a former worker’s cottage, or perhaps a storage barn of a larger estate or farm. There was also an intriguing passage in the Pinckney letter: “According to Madame Bru the old cottage was moved up from below about seventy-five years ago. Personally, all I think they brought up was the large cornerstones and most of the woodwork. I have never encountered any conclusive evidence on the subject.” What on earth could this mean?
The questions began to dog me. Who would know?
I started with Madame Sanchez at the mairie. It was late morning and no one else was there requiring her attention. She rose with a smile of recognition, though it had been nearly three years since we’d met over the water business. I stated my purpose: to track the owners of my house. I half expected a sigh of hopelessness: there would be forms to fill out, a bureaucratic maze to negotiate, months—years?—awaiting approval, and so on. Instead, she nodded agreeably. From the back room, she brought out several enormous, ancient books, which looked to me as if they belonged in a museum. Yet she leafed and riffled through them as if they were no more precious than paperbacks. In elegant brown script, the properties were listed according to owners.
Madame Sanchez had the bloodhound instincts of a born researcher. In fact, she became so caught up in her quest that she seemed to forget my presence. I didn’t say a word as I watched her work: mumbling names and dates to herself, scurrying back and forth from the back room, digging out more documents, and making hasty notes on a piece of paper. This went on for over an hour. I was diverted by photographs of Carennac schoolchildren hanging on one wall, from 1918, 1928, and 1931. I find old photographs of people both riveting and disturbing, as if the camera stopped life, froze them in time. They stare back at us across the years: once we were young, they say, with the world before us. Now we are old; some of us have passed away. This is the only testimony to who we were.
If I could find out who had lived in Pech Farguet, the records would stand as testimony: this is who we were.
At one point during Madame Sanchez’s research, a young gentleman, apparently a salesman of computer equipment, dropped in. He didn’t get far with his pitch. She was too busy, another time, she told him distractedly. An elderly gentleman followed on his heels; she greeted him enthusiastically. Perhaps he could shed some light on the mystery of who had lived at Pech Farguet? He shook his head disconsolately at the unreliability of his memory. It was too long ago. She never asked this gentleman’s business, and after a patient ten-minute wait he went away.
Eventually, Madame Sanchez organized her findings on a single piece of paper and handed it to me. Her handwriting was in the same rather florid style of the Bézamats’ and Hirondes’, as if they’d all learned penmanship from the same nun. Here’s how it read:
1841 M Frêne Jean
1849 M Bayssen Jean (peutêtre 2 filles)
1872 M Malbet Antoine, gendre de M Bayssen Jean
1888 M Bouat Jean, gendre de M Bayssen Jean
1943 Mme Bouat Jean (veuve)
1966 Mme Lasfargues née Bouat
Mme Trémouille née Bouat
(2 filles de M et Mme Bouat Jean)
1969 M Pinckney
I pored over this amazing list. Madame Sanchez reviewed it for me. Monsieur Jean Bayssen, she explained, probably had two daughters; Antoine Malbet and Jean Bouat would have been his sons-in-law. At Jean Bouat’s death, his widow inherited the house, but, she added, she hadn’t lived there. The house was unoccupied for years and years during that period. (This would accord with Gabrielle Servais’s recollection that during the war my house had served as a refuge, which made sense given its high vantage point and camouflage of woods.) When the two daughters inherited the property at her death, it continued to remain unoccupied, since they had married and lived elsewhere with their husbands.
Could she guess what the men’s occupations would have been? I asked. “Paysans,” she said simply. Farmers. What would they make of me? What would they think of the transformation of Pech Farguet? I imagined them standing in a line outside the house, their faces ruddy and weathered, their rough hands soiled from labor in the fields. Jean Frêne, Jean Bayssen, Antoine Malbet, Jean Bouat. “Je suis heureuse de faire votre connaissance,” I say, in my proper schoolgirl’s French. They extend their elbows out of politeness. But I shake their hands, feeling the gritty earth. I invite them in and they are surprised, amazed at the look of the place. They nod at me, smiling in approval.
I thanked Madame Sanchez for giving me so much time. Come back, she offered, when she had more time and she would trace it further. The house was much older, of course, surely dating back to the early part of the nineteenth century.
I’d never experienced the pleasure of research before—my education had been one long process of rote memorization, it seemed—and I’d caught something of the thrill of it. It was akin, I guessed, to an archaeological dig, unearthing the mysteries of the past. Madame Sanchez’s efforts had yielded a bare outline. I wanted flesh and bones. Perhaps there was more I could ferret out.
I decided to pay a call on Jean Mas, the notaire whose office is on a nondescript side street in Puybrun and who officiated at the closing of my house. Perhaps he could add to these skeletal details. I rang the bell and soon heard footsteps trundling down the stairs. The old wooden door was opened by a middle-aged woman who escorted me up the stairs to the waiting room.
Monsieur Mas is a tiny, pencil-thin man, but he has the presence of a giant, with a frigid air that instills in me a sense of inferiority. He dresses impeccably, with vest and silk tie. Yes, he remembered me as the pro
priétaire of Pech Farguet. He invited me to sit in the stiff leather chair in front of his desk. He remained standing before me in a posture suggesting that I get to the point. I explained hurriedly that I wanted to trace the history of my house and who had lived there. He pursed his lips and clasped his hands in a prayerlike gesture. He explained that he had drawn up that information for Mr. Pinckney, but that it had been a costly procedure. He was not in a position to divulge this same information to me.
I was stymied. Should I offer something for access to this information? Couldn’t he pass it on to me—he’d already done the research, after all—for some nominal fee? Or was there some fuzzy moral issue involved here that escaped me? Confused and uncertain, I merely expressed my regret. What might he suggest? I asked him, if I wanted to pursue this.
“Madame Trémouille, à Carennac,” he said, in a low tone, as if in an aside to someone else in the room. Nothing more. Just Madame Trémouille, at Carennac. Then he drew himself up and anointed me with an officious smile. “Bonne journée,” he said to conclude our meeting.
I tripped down the stairs. Madame Trémouille. So, the woman who had inherited the house in 1966 lived in Carennac! I savored this new bit of information, feeling like Nancy Drew.
The next day I went back to Madame Sanchez. The lunch hour was fast approaching—as usual when I have important business.
I told her I would like to meet Madame Trémouille. “Elle habite Carennac, n’est-ce pas?”
Madame replied that she was just about to close up and that she would lead me to the house.
She locked the office and we set off at a brisk pace around the corner toward the center of the village. I was breathless. I hadn’t quite expected such immediate action and was suddenly tremulous at the thought of actually meeting the woman. We walked along the street, one that I’d strolled along time and again, that led to the church. When we reached the house, she rapped on one of the doors, beautifully carved in wood with a brass hand for a knocker. No one was home. I was half relieved. Now I had time to prepare myself.
Madame Sanchez and I parted, and I drove home for lunch. The weekend slipped past and on Monday I drove into Carennac to Madame Trémouille’s house. An elderly woman, perhaps in her late seventies, opened the door. She had snow-white hair, but was tall, sturdily upright, and robust. I introduced myself and she invited me in. I’d always been curious about the interiors of the village houses. (In fact, I’ve always been curious about the interiors of houses in general, harking back perhaps to the Christine experience.) The door opened directly into the living room, with its stuffed chairs and a general clutter of magazines and newspapers. When I explained my purpose, she smiled kindly but said she remembered very little of those days. It would be better to talk to her older sister, Madame Virginie Lasfargues. She lived in Mézel, around four kilometers away. I thanked her and bowed out. This was somewhat disappointing, and baffling. Why couldn’t she tell me anything? Why would her older sister know more than she?
I located Mézel on my map and drove there directly. The village was at the end of a steep incline. I parked Charleston and approached several workmen smoking in the sun by their truck. They pointed up a narrow footpath that climbed even higher. I struggled up the rocky passage. At the summit was a small house with a stone patio. I rang the bell, which set off the usual dog alarm. After some minutes the door opened a crack. Madame Lasfargues was stooped and wizened, surely in her late eighties.
I explained, slowly, rather loudly, for her head was pitched forward and tilted as if she was hard of hearing, that I presently owned the house in which she had grown up.
She replied in a raspy, quavering voice that she could hear me quite well. What I felt would be extraordinary news to her seemed of little interest.
Over the yaps of the little white mutt, I asked her if she could tell me anything about the house.
She closed the door behind her and toddled to the stone wall that overlooked the valley. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall; in her loose gray dress and brown shawl, she was a mere sparrow. As we stood in the sunlight I could see the gray film of her cataractous eyes behind her glasses. She looked off to the distance, as if she’d forgotten my purpose. I followed her gaze to the river below.
Her grandparents, she said, had owned the house. Did she know who had built it? She had no idea. Her grandfather had been a tenant farmer, who worked on land across the causse. Perhaps he had been en métayage, I suspected, sharing the crop with the owner. After his death, the house passed to his son, her father, who was also a farmer. Her family included a younger sister and brother, she said. I remarked that it was a small house for five people. The present garage, she explained, had formerly been another room.
She had been born in the house, while her sister had been born in Gintrac. Both she and her sister had married and moved away from home. When her parents died, the house quite naturally passed on to the son, her brother, who by then had married. (Madame Sanchez’s records had skipped a beat.) When he died—no, she couldn’t remember the year—she and her sister decided to sell the house, since they’d established a life with their husbands elsewhere. The Pinckneys bought the house. (So, it would seem, Madame Bru’s speculation about the house’s being moved from the valley was ill-founded.)
She fell silent and stood dazedly, snared in the cobwebs of memory. I bent down and commented on the beautiful view of the river from her house. She took off her glasses, as if to take in an unfiltered perspective.
“Même avec ces vieux yeux, ” she said wryly. Even with these old eyes.
In the fall, I was back at the mairie. It was a crisp, sunny morning. The fog in the valley, which I always regard with despair from my bedroom window, had already burned off, as it usually does, to my continual amaze ment. The muffled chant of the schoolchildren swelled from the classroom. The trees in the courtyard were just turning color, rustling in the strong breeze. (I can never look at such animated trees without thinking of my friend Leslie, who, as a child, thought the leaves stirred up the wind, rather than the reverse—a brilliant child’s interpretation of a phenomenon of nature, it struck me, and a cornerstone of her particular brand of wisdom.)
Madame Sanchez agreed to continue digging into my house’s history, but she said that she couldn’t offer a great deal of hope. The records might not go much further back than we’d seen before. Out came the books, and like a groundhog she began tunneling through them again, one by one, back and forth, peering down through her green-and-blue-speckled bifocals.
After a half hour or so of this, a tall, handsome gentleman entered and joined her behind the counter. She briefly explained her mission to him. He smiled at me in a sympathetic, mild-mannered way and started perusing the books himself, as if he’d caught our fever. Eventually, between them, they traced the ownership of Jean Frene further back, to 1824. But that was as far as the books took them. Then, having identified the plot of Pech Farguet as No. 854, they resorted to maps, plowing through a stack in a cabinet by the window. At the bottom, the oldest map, from 1816, indeed had the number etched in a faint chicken scratch of ink. I ran my hand over the rough, heavy, cream-colored paper in awe. Shouldn’t these be under lock and key, in a climate-controlled storeroom?
That was the best they could do, they said in accord, with a shrug of shoulders. Monsieur said that in all likelihood, the house predated 1816, but surely would have been owned by Frene or his father. I was satisfied.
I bowed to Madame Sanchez and thanked her for all the time she’d spent on my behalf. Tracking down the previous owners of the house gave me a sense of continuity; the specific names and dates were the building blocks on which I stood. I felt a link with the past, rooted. I nodded to Monsieur and said, congenially, that I hadn’t realized that he worked at the office along with Madame.
Yes, he said, as if he’d swallowed a frog, I work here because I’m the mayor! He extended his hand. Evariste Marty, he said, introducing himself and managing to maintain his a
plomb.
Madame’s smile was a perfect red bow.
18
THE FILM
“Je suis crevée de fatigue,” I announced to Raymond when I met him at the station. It was an emphatic way of stating my feeling of exhaustion—literally, I’m croaking from fatigue—that I’d recently learned in my French class. It was the perfect moment to test it out, jet- and train-lagged as I was.
“Nous disons ‘morte de fatigue,’ ” he replied, with emphasis on the morte, as we headed for the car. I understood this as a sort of minor correction. Raymond’s version was exactly as we’d say it in English: dead tired. But why hadn’t my expression worked?
(When I later told my teacher, Huguette, who is from Paris, she was tickled. “Ah,” she explained, “there’s Paris French and there’s country French. They’re often more proper in the country.”)
It was October 1994. As we drove off, Raymond took a route other than our usual one from St-Dénis to Carennac. I asked him why he was taking this direction.
“À cause du film,” he said, with a sideward glance.
A film? This escaped my understanding.
Oui. He nodded vigorously. A film was being made in Carennac.
My first reaction was one of horror—the film industry descending on, invading, the village! My village.
Raymond, however, was ebullient. He explained that the film was for a television series that would be aired in the spring. It was based on a novel, La Rivière Espérance, the first part of a historical trilogy by Christian Signol, who, he said, is one of France’s most popular and prolific writers. The river, he related, is the Dordogne. The story is about the coming-of-age of a thirteen-year-old boy named Benjamin Donnadieu, who joins his father, the captain of several barges (gabares, as they were called), in his business of shipping wood from Souillac to the viticulturists in Bordeaux. Souillac would not do as a setting for the film, however, because the town had been modernized. Carennac had been chosen for its resemblance to villages of the early nineteenth century, where the story is set.