Ricochet

by Robyn Neilson

  I decided that unimaginative or merciful, are categories of dying I would rather seize. When finally I got mobile reception, I rang Loup, frantic, and he made fun of me. But with concern he offered, ‘Tell me where you’ll be in two hours. I’ll pick you up after work.’ Obsessed by every detail in my new surroundings, I could describe to him precisely where I would descend the hills, so although Loup did not know the country, he was able to meet me just on dark, near the paddock with the white and the black horses where the cedar trees give way to an olive grove leading to the stone shepherd’s hut with the broken lilac gate; along the Avenue de là Sainte-Baume… that is, the point at which the diminutive D45A intersected with the still narrower D45B. Loup needed a less empirical landmark. He reached me at that point on the map now embedded in me, just as the next onslaught of lightning was about to hit.

  Since that day, Loup often remarks, ‘Do you notice Frey, whenever we discover a place that we both love, there is a white horse nearby? It’s a sign’. Loup is right. Frequently we do find a horse, alone at the end of our trails. My best encounter was a year later, with a wild chestnut beauty on the sheltered plateau of an Alpine pass. The 14-hands animal and I were alone in the saddle of the mountain. Another year expired before Loup and I could both return there. The same horse was waiting in the same spot. Surrounded by wildflowers, bees and surprisingly, big fat flies, just like home. It let us greet him and Loup stroked his tangled blonde mane.

  Since that day when Loup rescued me from the storm, France’s nature is my addiction. Celestial and carnal forces skewer her charm…. authentic Terre… steam rising from horse-manure… an old man berating the sky with his shepherd’s baton… the contradiction of a crazed city… and crazier auto-routes all interlacing…. chaos within half an hour of a 16th Century postcard. Since that day, I resolve that one day Loup will have his dream: his white horse out in the paddock. Just as I have experienced my own Whitehorse: the ice and river-bound birthplace of my daughters. I want to share that place one day with Loup. But he has his own trove of mysterious places. Perhaps it is each other’s strangeness that attracts? Our separate pasts, uncertain and étrange. A paradox: our love described by my friend Agnés as ‘un coup de foudre’. A bolt of lightning.

  Today at the hut the storm has given way to floods. The news on France Inter reports storm casualties: several injured in the Alps, four hikers dead after a mudslide on the GR 20, an arduous long-distance trail in Corsica. And there are grave fears for a Danish woman who went missing whilst walking the Path to Santiago, the Chemin de Compostelle in the Pyrénées. I thank Christ I didn’t take off last week. Desperate to leave, to return to the Path… there must be an angel who knows my weakness. Pascal? (Yes, I believe you know my weakness for paths that lead me away from this hut, from the grim misère we have made for ourselves. You should know; you are part of it).

  The first time I embarked upon the Compostelle I did not think of myself as a pilgrim. But I returned changed by my encounters with genuine pilgrims. In particular, the older women: women who were accustomed to staying at home knitting for their grandchildren, who nevertheless tackled the long path alone, every year, two weeks or two months at a time. They would confess to me,

  ‘My husband has given me his blessing, and each year I return to walk another stage. It is something that I want to accomplish on my own….’They invariably ended with an apology for not being athletic, for not belonging to an elite hierarchy of hikers,

  ‘…même si je ne suis pas une grande marcheuse.’

  Those women fill me with hope. I plead for the safety of the lone Danish girl. I crave to be out there, hiking the Path with those women; but instead I return to my mundane pilgrimage. To that journée, almost six years to the day, when I was alone in Auriol, engrossed in my embroidery.

  8 Rue du Sarret, Auriol 2009.

  “Sweet hours have perished here,

  This is a timid room –

  Within it’s precincts hopes have played

  Now fallow in the tomb.”

  Emily Dickinson

  My first address as a new wife in France: it is early June, six summers ago. I think it was a Tuesday.

  Mardi: normally an ordinary day, when Loup arrives home more or less on time; not like a Monday or a Friday, when he is held back. And perhaps it seems like a Tuesday because I felt flat. Monday was a day I enjoyed, after spending the weekend with Loup, either helping him on a job, or if he were free we would head off camping somewhere, losing ourselves in the mountains. So that by Monday, there was always a few loads of washing to do, camping gear to clean, sleeping bags to air, and then the time-consuming task of cramming all our equipment back into secluded corners of our tiny home.

  When, after our long separation, I first visited Loup here, I was charmed by the petite maison with its cerulean door and shutters opening directly onto the street. It was dwarfed by the other houses around it, crammed between two towering walls; an afterthought. It felt as if I might soon be joining the ranks of ‘The Borrowers’, living off the crumbs that fell from the giant homes all around. When Loup explains that his rented lodging used to be a stable, its tacked-on appearance makes sense. Now, a year later, I see the wonder and absurdity of it all. I have traversed the world; left behind my daughters, my ageing parents, my job, my husky, my friends, my wild Cape, to live in a one-stall stable. My own house is no bigger than a two-stall stable, but when I step outside, the Southern Ocean pounds beneath. Snakes slither from the bushes, ambush me under terracotta pots, and wait in silence in the high grass along the cliff’s edge. Returning from long walks late, I am ambushed again. This time by old buck kangaroo grazing at my wobbly gate, his testicles absurd as they drag across the ground, his brawny neck and shoulders withering; unhinged, outcast, alone.

  Gentrification is a waste of time chez moi; where I come from.

  Here however, at Loup’s rented stable, when I step outside I am on the road. Everything is béton: concrete and bitumen. Unless you tilt back your head, to find impressionist light suspended between roof tiles; bold and bright between the black cross-stitch of a multitude of wires. As soon as you re-enter the blue front door, (the only door, there is no back door), you take three steps down into the kitchen: the engine room. It houses the toilet, washing machine, combined bookshelf and pantry, with a spiral staircase wedged into the corner. The area is about two metres wide, and four long. I fall for that staircase; the timber is worn under the weight of many feet, the patina of the handrail gleaming under the press of many hands.

  Soon, I will fall in an unexpected way. The stairs down to the toilet and back up to our bed becoming an obstacle I cannot master. The two-metre distance from anywhere to anywhere, even on the flat, insurmountable. But my legs were not broken. Confounded, Loup and his sister will one-day carry me off to get fixed. But my legs are not broken, I will protest from the back seat. Struggling to speak. So I repeat the same useless phrase, there is nothing wrong with my legs.

  But this comes after.

  Here, at 8 Rue de Sarret, Loup has everything arranged in precise order. There is no place for decoration or mess. The two exceptions are the small Aboriginal dot paintings with which I dared to entice Loup back. Posted two years earlier, a goanna and a yabby… I had remembered Loup’s minimalist palette… charcoal, anthracite and white…. and his intrigue with the art form: symbols of innocence concealing sadness. Once I had by providence found myself in the artists’ land; seen their hope, their renaissance. I could not think of better emissaries with which to entrust my own audacious hope. So when I see the yabby and goanna presiding over Loup’s miniature domain, I know I have found my new home.

  One simple white Ikea table occupies the space under one window. A drab window, as it looks out onto the three adjoining walls of the neighbouring three-storey houses, and the cell-like courtyard where all their effluent pipes end up. And where the neighbour with the dog, takes it to squat, leaving its pooh lying around to steam and get crusty. Our senses are abrup
tly disturbed in the mornings by the noise and odours of the neighbours going about their daily ablutions. On hot days, the rising stench is nauseating.

  Either side of the white table sit two small wooden folding chairs. My cooking bench consists of a gas camping stove and microwave. Loup loves his kitchen, because he can reach everything without having to get up from the table. The fridge, the coffee-machine, the sink, the stove, the washing machine, the pantry and the gas-burner… they are all within an easy arm’s length. Above the oven is our other window, which opens directly onto the street. So we do not in fact, open it. Standing there whilst cooking, I am a voyeur, too close to the legs of passers-by. Amused and astonished by the theatrics of neighbours reversing, stalling, revving and cursing to secure a car park. Parking in the centre-ville is all about the ruse.

  Until Loup and I hear on the radio of a man who was so incensed by a young couple having parked in his spot, that he charged upstairs and shot them. Their innocent mistake now a tragedy. The ruse turned monstrueux: they had left their car for a careless moment in the neighbour’s territory, so they could show off their brand new baby to friends.

  Neither of our downstairs windows lets in any sunlight, so I prefer to do my sewing on the floor upstairs. Here at least we have one generous window, which looks down the street and across to the terraced garden of our elderly neighbours, Jeanine and Léo. When I first arrived at my new Auriol home, Loup had slept on the floor on his narrow hiking mattress, giving me his single bed. ‘It’s fine Freya,’ he said. ‘It’s summer, so don’t worry.’ Negotiating my nesting, not wishing to cause alarm in my husband’s solitary den, I nevertheless bid for a shared mattress. We inadvertently created a spectacle for the neighbours, having a hell of a time hauling the leaden thing up off the street through the French windows; there was no way it could fit through the front door and up the narrow spiral staircase.

  Like children discovering that their parent’s bed is a trampoline, we took advantage of our new mattress filling the entire room. It meant we could discover new gymnastic ways of lovemaking. I had three walls to lever off and press against, feeling the full impact of every manoeuvre. Loup could throw me up in a handstand, surprising us both as the wall supported me. Nine years to make up for, our shyness beaten out like yielding metal. Together we moulded our sharp edges into curves, and I ended up with sensational rashes from the rough concrete render, reminding me of when Loup and I first met and I had worried that my daughters would ask for an explanation for the carpet-burn on my knees and back. Of course, they already had that figured out.

  The fresh rashes notch up the excitement: everything here in Auriol being a revelation. Lying spent, with the French windows open to the night air as it drifts down, moss-damp from the hills… the smells of a fish dinner across the lane… of marijuana puffs wafting up from the courtyard… the annoyance of the neighbours’ television and the clatter of their cutlery… the amusing climax-yelps of the woman down the street… the less amusing whine of the mopeds screaming down the narrow lane… and late into the night, the clamour of the village carnival, which just about drove us demented.

  Mardi, Tuesday 16 June 2009.

  “To sew is to pray”

  Louise Erdrich, ‘Four Souls.’

  The river of remembering beckons, not to extinguish the bad memory, rather total immersion. A risk that it might well drown me. After all, there is little else to do today. The cauldron crackles… electricity shreds the sky, ropes of rain lash. Poked and jabbed, after three days, là terre caves in. Each of our I-gadgets, (a small but significant condolence), is out of battery. But I cannot start the generator and leave it in this torrent. Leaden dark at 4pm in early summer.

  Crazy. Dingue.

  Our tiny Ikea solar lamps struggle to give off sufficient light. I look for humour in how futile this weather renders my endeavours. The French country folk simply stay resolute in their gumboots, shrug and say: ‘Il pleut comme vaches qui pisses…. It’s raining like pissing cows.’

  Our bedroom window smashes open with a wallop, and all my side of the bed is soaked. I begin to pen the memories, and the irony occurs to me that after six years, the first two sentences of my story remain exactly the same….

  Feeling a bit flat today…Loup won’t be home until late…

  I put my faith in the writing to re-make the story. But I want to check my memory against fact, so I search back to a 2009 calendar on my flailing phone, and see that indeed, it was a Tuesday….

  ….So that gives me time to get all this goddamn washing dry and iron all his shirts… and tee-shirts, and even his jeans…Jesus, who irons jeans and tee-shirts these days? Apparently the French do! And now I’m a wife of a Frenchman… after my first two cups of orange pekoe tea… a small triumph in a country of Nespresso converts… I’ve finally found good quality loose leaf tea and bought a little porcelain sieve which sits neatly inside my mug… I then scoff too many dark chocolate Petit écolier biscuits,but will compensate later by running up the hills to the chapel and beyond. Thank Christ for those hills and the forest and the chapel, otherwise I wouldn’t fit up the stairs…I must stop going to the boulangerie… the Auriol bakery is deservedly reputed as the best for miles around.

  My mundane routine gives me structure; I turn on the radio, which I barely understand, but the music they play compensates. I hear the hometown twang of Angus and Julia Stone…apparently the darlings on the French scene at the moment. I bought A Book Like This with me, and Loup loves it too. We don’t have a CD player, so we listen to it whenever we’re out in the car. It’s not such a leap to imagine that Loup is Just a Boy, and that we are both Wasted, on the potion of our love. Impatient however to learn French songs, I shimmy around the table when I hear Christophe Mae, and coerce my mouth to mimic the unfamiliar sounds of Renaud’s ‘Mistrales Gagnant’.

  The ironing takes over an hour. The constant rearranging of the table to accommodate the pop-up ironing board, which slips so that I have to start again, feels like an heroic feat. Fucking stupid useless board, we need a real one. Anyway, who does iron jeans these days? Nevertheless, I crease Loup’s shirts with precision, just the way he likes them. I then iron my collection of vintage silks and cottons, determined to make some progress with my sewing today. Waiting for my new husband to return home, the hours of each day have an insatiable need to be filled, like my appetite for French pastries. Sewing I decide, will fill those hours, become a ‘worthy’ occupation. So, I begin to re-create; hand-sew and embroider elaborate scarves and wraps out of vintage fabric.

  Loup is incensed when he realizes that I spend more of my time and money sourcing old lace, retro prints, silk threads and bizarre buttons, than I do in selling my scarves. But it’s my money, I insist, and my time. This disagreement becomes a recurring theme…Loup cannot see the value in investing hours of effort and expense without an equivalent financial return. I can see his point, but flinch away from the familiar line of my father’s… yet another reminder of their powerful resemblance. Stunned each time I run into their wall of pragmatism, I finally see that their frustrating likeness is a thing to cherish. They were and are both, hard headed visionaries.

  Having carefully hung Loup’s shirts from the centre of each spiral stair, I stand back and admire the cascade of grey, blue, and white. I am satisfied with my work, but relieved that I can retire the hot iron because the morning sun, although it cannot shine directly through our windows, makes a glaring presence. The underground kitchen is suddenly claustrophobic, but smells fresh-laundry-clean. Jeanine our neighbour said of the clean cotton scent one morning when she came with a gift of pot plants, ‘Ça sent bonne’.

  As her words rolled together in my ear, I thought she was referring to Là Sainte Baume, the nearby old-growth forest where the nuns live below, and the priests live above. High up on a precarious perch built by the Catalans in the fifth century; where they guard a bone of Mary Magdalene’s in a gold cage, saying that she took refuge there in the concealed deep cave. T
oday, believers climb the massif to light candles and say a prayer for their lost loved ones. Or the ones they are about to lose. Water drips down the interior of the grotto, and it is always cold, no matter how hot the day is. I go there because it is a natural wonder. And because I feel less alone in the presence or the possibility of, a spiritual wonder.

  My second Sunday in France, when Loup was occupied, I stepped straight out from our blue door, and map in hand, walked the least direct way, through rambling villages and groups playing là pétanque on the shaded roadsides, all the way up to Mary Magdalene’s bone. Thirty-four kilometres in thirty-four degrees. Arriving exhausted, épuisée, and elated; it felt like a true endeavour. In part, a true pilgrimage. A good-looking young monk sat perched on the stone precipice, 30 metres above the highest trees in the forest canopy. He swung his sandaled legs out into the air, in what seemed a brazen dare. Or else a confident certitude: his God cared for him. This monk was no ingénu; he spoke with experience in and of the world. He recounted his own pilgrimage, of leaving behind attachment, including his wallet. His face cracked up like any young man’s would, as he told the story of discovering a monastery water fountain that gushed wine into his water bottle instead of water.

  I didn’t even think to look at Mary’s bone; distracted by this man’s path, his renunciation. I left distraught by the letters of grieving parents pleading to God to spare their children. I had no notion then that I might return soon to light my own candles.