‘Chérie, what’s that putain smell?’ it is my job to go in search of new lime. Loup had tried unsuccessfully to find a fresh source, as the garden and building supplier had stopped selling it. In fact finding lime in France was now like trying to buy a gun: illegal to sell or buy it without a licence.
‘It’s to burn and bury my wife, the ball-breaker, là casse couilles’ Loup would joke with the good-humoured nursery owner, whenever she needed to note his request. Lucky for him she took a liking to him. I was less caustique, not daring to use the same humour when I tried in vain at my third Jardinière, who asks sternly,
‘Do you know this product Madame? What is it you are using it for?’
I could hardly reply, ‘To torture my trou du cul, arsehole husband!’
Reminded of Aurélien, I wonder where he has got to… I haven’t seen him since that dank morning in early spring, when he made me laugh by his bug-eyed incredulity: ‘you mean you don’t have any heat or light?’ Before we had our potbelly, and the midday temperature was all of 3 degrees. But neither do I seek him out, uncertain of the path of friendship in this new land; disappointed that our roads lead in different directions. Loup and I think he has a new lady; we’ve seen different cars there, seen a woman unloading kids and bikes and heard music all night. I am happy for Aurélien. But shocked by the shrinkage of my own life; how can I spend so much time speculating on the habits of my neighbour?
‘Has he gone climbing today? He’s not home yet... I hope he is safe. His generator is on... he must be welding.’
‘Look, did you see that girl?’ asks Loup, ‘she seems a bit young’.
‘Nah, she’s not the one he likes…he told me ages ago, he met up with a mate’s ex on Facebook…’
‘You mean the one with the kids? Poor guy, another cougar victim!’ Loup jibes.
‘Tais-toi…. he told me he’s always wanted kids.’
‘His blinds are still closed, but his van is still there…must be sleeping off another all-nighter,’ says the conscientious Loup, convinced that Aurélien’s autonomy and rave parties means he’s doing something shady. And has with cunning circumnavigated the system. I envy Aurélien that he has escaped the leviathan, which Loup cannot.
We are guilty of being busybodies, according to Loup, France’s second sport after striking, like the town criers on benches at the entrance to each village; or the women who hang out of the top-storey windows as I once did in Auriol, watching and waiting. Inventing a salacious story to ease the drudgery.
Of course Loup and I discovered later that we, and I in particular as a female alone, were ourselves under surveillance, and the subject of our various neighbours’ speculations. Who as it turned out, were mostly male. This was apparently no place for a woman. Unlike our neighbours, sequestered behind their high hedges or stonewalls, we sat exposed at the dead-end of the track behind a cyclone fence: an easy target. We were after all wedged in-between a hunting reserve and an Army rifle range. Months later in the hunting season, trigger-happy chasseurs came too close, and I was a sitting duck as I peed outside on the thyme.
I can no longer tolerate the merde on the breath of the mistral. Annoyed by my incompréhension of an intellectual radio discussion on France Inter, irritated by Aurélien living a vivid life in this hellhole, desperate for Loup to return so we can walk to the high crag I discovered, above all pissed off with myself and Pascal, I flit half-heartedly through the one English book that I have in a French translation. I bought it thinking that Loup might listen to me practice reading aloud, and because I want to be its author. But Loup falls asleep. Which astounds me, given the horror of ‘The Road’. As with listening to the French radio, my reading in a foreign tongue is surreal, and inexact. But there is an advantage to being one step removed from the literal. Everything takes on more intensity.
More poetry, more beauty, more terror.
In ‘La Route’, the words’ alien appearance and sound alone evokes fright, and I am relieved that it doesn’t continue to be our nightly read. Cormac McCarthy’s text translated into French seems even more ominous; it’s etymology more eerie. But Loup has heard enough to say, ‘we are the lucky ones. There’s always somebody further down the food chain.’ In the murky lure of the events along ‘The Road’, this seems a careless cliché. When I turn on the news, and France Inter reports of a heinous act, a decapitation farther up the road, it is the tremor in the journalist’s voice that alarms. This has happened, this is happening here, right now. This is not a fictional road. Our hut might be the best place to hunker down. An ill wind, more ill than the mistral, is blowing across France, unsettling her very foundations. Out loud as if to Pascal, I reread several times the closing lines of ‘La Route’ and attach myself to its thread of hope.
‘…. Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains…on their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.’
Mapping the Chemin.
"Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and hummed of mystery."
Cormac McCarthy The Road.
It is a curious thing that Loup and I do not necessarily love the same things. For example, Loup is not a fan of my maps. To him, they are cumbersome, invasive. He retreats to the bed with his digital friends; the generator re-charging our family of I-gadgets, our luxury concession, and Loup’s fixation.
Meanwhile, I am fixated with matching up roads and trails and rivers on paper. Unable to stop thinking of the lost Danish girl, obsessed by the call to revisit the Path, of finding again some like-minded women with whom I can speak French. Speaking to a ghost has its limitations. Guilt, and a futile desire to protect Loup from the leviathan, from his goddamned registered letters, keeps me from leaving. And so I stay and wait. Waiting for the distant hump of hills to swallow up the heat; waiting for the mistral to blow itself into extinction, waiting for Sunday.
Another radio emission snaps me out of my lethargy. The piece is a report on the so-called gypsies of Romania, who have been wandering Europe, landless for centuries. The Roma are now a stigmatised minority, facing discrimination and hate crimes. But it seems a few are also guilty of crimes towards their own; children are trafficked, and teenage girls forced into marriage or prostitution.
Today’s story comes from a small rural community in France who decided to actively accept the Roma as part of their town, providing them with a clean, safe environment, far from the dismal encampments under railway bridges. The children go to school in the village, and there is a restoration of pride for all concerned. Many other towns in France are following suit; in fact Loup and I often pass a nearby Romanian campsite, where their luxury vans plug into power, water, barbeques and playground amenities, all provided by the municipality. We think we may be better off there. But not today, after hearing the accounts of some Roma women.
It is another curious thing, that each time I listen to a testimony, a témoignage of tragedy on the French radio, I have no trouble in understanding. No trouble in interpreting the controlled quiver in the voice of the reporter. My thoughts return to the Chemin de Compostelle, and the mysterious gypsy woman I met there, when two years ago I had escaped the hut.
Not an escape by way of the gnawing desertion that lures me now. Back then it was a dignified dream, which I confided in my husband. Seeking his approval was important, as was that of my family in Australia. Before my father died, he gave me his blessing to walk this Chemin. It would have been more satisfying for him if I had found there some kind of spiritual breakthrough; a return to my beginnings. But no, I simply revelled in France’s nature. And her pilgrims. Finally, the Compostelle was the only long-distance trail where Loup felt comfortable for me to go alone. The idea grew and grew in my head, my unfolded maps outgrew the hut, until Loup surrendered and said, ‘Aller, aller, Go Freya!’
As it was, the Préfecture summoned me back to Marseille after only one w
eek in, so like the other women I would meet, my Path was interrupted by domestic obligations and later recommenced, twice. The second year when I returned, I carried with me a vial of my father’s ashes. Alive, he would have revelled in the Chemin’s communal aspect, its breath-taking architecture and landscape. A small dose of him is buried in a field beside a medieval Basque chapel. Here on the Path, carrying my father on my back, making chance encounters along the way, I was the happiest I’d been in a long time.
Ilona is one such encounter. And Stéphanie. Their paths remind me of other mysterious wanderers encountered along the road in Australia. They rescue me from this petty mad-making-mistral-merde.
Chemin de Saint Jacques and the Noresman Road.
"I am made up of all I have met"
Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
"Perils share this beauty that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers"
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.
It is May. Spring is late on the sparse plateau of Aubrac. Crocuses dare the air to bite, nudging their purple heads up through sedge and clods of earth. Seeing them, I had an instant déjà vu of a distant place. Another home away from home in the Yukon, where each year we would be overcome with relief when after six months of being snowbound, the first brave crocuses appeared.
Now, after passing under a bend of beech and birch, climbing up and down through narrow medieval rues, reaching the prairies of Aubrac is a revelation. Naked beauté, nu. Not one tree perforates the skyline. I feel intoxicated, being the tallest vertical line in the landscape, as if I am the sole conduit connecting the earth and the air. I walk in a trance, grasswaterstonesky, grasswaterstonesky.
Following in silence the miles and miles of low stone walls, I’m reminded of my home in Australia, where convicts once lugged and laid granite upon granite; inscribing lines across the land. Lines that dared to coerce rocky gullies and belligerent bush into pasture for the early settlers. Here in Aubrac, I tread other ancient lines: the original paths trod by Romans. I study the inscriptions in the roadside bourns, and am reverent before the solitary crosses. Not a reverence motivated by spiritual belief, but an overwhelming reverence for time, history, human toil and human wonder. I wonder at my own nation’s tumultuous relationship with the land; how, as convict and immigrant whites, we struggled against climate and authority to cultivate and conquer. And how we misunderstood and mistreated the original inhabitants: the obscenity of colonisation. I think of when I rode my pushbike through the Kimberley, the Oodnadatta and the Larapinta lands, sensing that I should not be there without introduction; feeling a certain anxiety that the first inhabitants were visible only through being invisible.
I wonder whether the reason France’s landscape is so easy to love, is because her citizens appear to be guilt-free in claiming it their own. On the surface, the landscape and human-scape are at peace, un-coerced. On the surface, there is no ‘stolen’ in her country, no ‘sorry’ in her politic. We do not hear about the Occitan, Basque, Catalan, Corsican, Alsatian and Breton, unless we go poking about in history. As a visitor having stood on the Pont Neuf, dazzled by the dance of light upon the Seine and the Notre Dame soaring above, any shame or need for apology seems ludicrous. Beauty being the perfect dissembler. I could not imagine my own burden of remorse lurking in the noble constructs of Old France; how vulgaire that would seem. And in my own intimate country, my marriage, Loup regards ‘sorry’ as a futile sentiment, and I learn that this is his cultural inheritance.
I wonder these things along the Chemins of Aubrac. But I am too besotted to probe. I am content to feel simply the cloak of unapologetic beauty brush across my skin. I drink in her luminosity. Swallow sunshine as it lances the fog. Press my flesh into the granite; my bone against the bone of the hands who worked the stone into fences and bridges, crosses and chapels, farms and houses. My eyes, greedy for the greens and greys: never before have I noticed the multitude of colours in grey.
And, I welcome the chill. Welcome the need to wear a beanie. Upon my back I carry my tent, sleeping bag, stove, food and water. This is not how most people hike the Chemin; but I prefer sleeping outside, rather than inside a dorm with heaters and snoring pilgrims. Some say that this restricts me from the path’s communality; on the contrary, it makes me appreciate more each episode of falling in step with another walker. Each encounter is gifted by the rhythm of walking. As opposed to the rhythm of eating or talking or sleeping communally, which I do occasionally miss. Half of the chemin’s challenge is my search for an obscure campsite each night. Some nights it proves impossible, and I am happy to find a gîte or private home that welcomes walkers.
Stéphanie.
When I meet my first gitane, Stéphanie, it is the gloaming end of the day, nearing the end of Autumn. It is my inaugural walk along the Compostelle. Searching for a secluded spot to pitch my tent, I stumble upon her improvised campsite, her three daughters and their dog. Two and a half months ago, they had stepped out of their farmyard door in the Swiss part of the Jura Alps, and now were approaching 2,000 kilometres. After sponge bathing in a shallow stream, the five of us sit up late around a campfire, while the youngest, Hanna, brushes the knots out of her mother’s ropey hair. We tell stories in French and Swiss-German and English, and I ache for the faces of my own daughters.
Stéphanie is a charismatic young woman, with some sadness behind her horsey smile. She trusted in her own instinct to drag her girls; aged nine, eleven and fifteen, along on this arduous walk, which would take them a third of the year.
‘Why not?’ retorted Stéphanie against the sceptics. ‘Why should I cease so my children can go to school? What is so great about normal life?’
I marvel at her magnificence, her audacity.
The night is bone-drilling cold and keeps me alert, until I slump into unsettling dreams, my head buried as far down in my sleeping bag as it can go. Then comes an eruption of sound. A barrage of rifle shots, of grunting and hooves, wild pigs charging, dogs yelping, men shouting; I could not be sure if this is an invention, or real. I strain to hear any noises from the girls above the cacophony; I had no idea what to do if there were real cause for alarm. The sun had not yet risen. So I lay still. Reliving another incident, far away. As if the fact that I’d survived that, proved that we would all survive this.
George.
A decade ago, after I had first met Loup on the Nullarbor Plain, I continued riding my bike west as planned. But I resisted arriving at the Indian Ocean the direct way. I wanted to prolong the adventure, heighten the stakes. Loup, who had ridden from that direction, drew me a mud map,
‘Here, you take this red-dirt road…straight, all way straight, south from Belladonia. From desert to coast.
It is very lonely, but very beautiful. Be sure you take plenty water.’
It was indeed a lonely road. Lonelier than the lonely roads I had already ridden. I ran out of food and water. I was scared. But after two hungry nights, my tires skidded to a halt in salt white sand, where shanties littered the breaking shore. A kiosk with flags beamed. Scoffing two ice creams in rapid succession, I found a caravan and a shower, barely noticing the jubilation I felt at reaching a string of jewelled bays, with aspirational French names: Cape Arid, Cape le Grand, Esperance.
I spent the next day trying to avoid a neighbouring caravan-dweller who materialized on his bike wherever I was headed. Which was mostly to the milk bar. He barricaded me with his host of phenomenal facts and personal disappointments.
‘You know we are not alone in this Universe. You know, there is indisputable evidence to prove Extra-Terrestrial life. And Artificial Intelligence? They invented it, not us! I have seen and met them. In fact I am the scientist who can prove they exist, and they’ve been here before, and AI is not our invention! That’s why the CSIRO found a way to get rid of me quietly, to discredit me. But I know they know I am right. They are all terrified of what I found.’
Thus spoke my new friend, an old-fashioned fellow with quiv
ering facial tics; a misunderstood genius. ‘I have two daughters and I did have a wife, but she left me … I can’t blame her, all the fuss… a defunct buffoon. But I have no regrets, saying what I said. There are other things I have discovered, too, but the Government is too small-minded to listen. You know Freya; this planet is doomed by puny vision. Excuse me, but I noticed your name in the sign in book… Freya Gordon… Norse and Scottish, a good blend… you’re not married, are you Freya?’
My scientist friend talks fitfully and fast. I listen at first out of genuine interest; he is fascinating. But as his interest in me mounts, and his proximity closes in, so does my dismay. He tells me of a nature reserve about 70 kilometres away, assuring me it would be a good spot to camp the next night. He offers to ride there with me. But I thank him, and explain that I need to get at least 100 kilometres farther down the track by tomorrow night.
It is hard to hide, in the white light between the shimmering caravans beside the sea. So I say I’m off to the showers, but take my bike with me and stuff my panniers with all my gear, and flee. Feeling rueful at abandoning such an honest chap. I pedal with fury. Through a discotheque sky, the sun squeezed between magenta and violet and orange dust; I hurry on. Putting as much distance between a man whose only ‘crime’, was that he believed he had proof of intelligent life beyond Earth, and that he would have taken me with him to prove it. By 10pm, the moon swelled behind me in the east, casting a gargoyle-shadow of myself in front of me, so that I was constantly looking over my shoulder to see what extra-terrestrial being might be riding upon my back.
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