Of maps and mazes and mal de pays.
"I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map – All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps"
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient.
Ilona and the unknown women of the Compostelle replace my absent friends. As do my maps. Which by their very existence invite me into where they are not: to a blank space, where I might insert myself, or a labyrinth, where I might detect a way. Old fashioned-paper and ink beguiles, requiring attention and assiduous mending with sticky tape. Loved places are worried away by my repeated touch. In Loup’s absence, my map family transforms our mouldy interior with the promise of an exhilarating exterior. They are quite simply, my friends.
Our deal is: on selected weekends, Loup accepts the maps’ guidance, putting aside his hi-tech, and trusting me to lead him wherever my maps entice. But first we have to traverse the tentacles of the AutoRoute. Parading as the major arteries of France, in bold blue violet and red, I find them insensitive, an insult to France’s real contours. They are not her true veins, rather a brazen tattoo. As a walker, I have been ambushed by their loud bravado. As a driver I attempt to ignore them, because they take me too brashly to my destination. Hurtling along at 130k’s per hour, the Auto Routes represent a frenetic necessary evil. Loup is a user. His work demands it.
I once had the confidence to shoot along these arteries. Pascal, I have you to thank for that. That daring première, our sweeping dash to your hometown, not tainted by tawdry fear, but with something else, more puissant, more insistent and powerful. Then, on my first trip alone, carrying all our belongings from the sea to the dry prairie, I got stuck at a twenty-four-lane péage, my Mastercards rejected, and nearly got myself killed trying to find a live attendant who could help. But after that humiliation, I start using the Auto-route too. An addict of speed, armed with piles of coin, I cut my travelling time in half. As if participation in this grown up game facilitated a necessary initiation into French culture.
This time in France however, efficiency is not a priority. Neither is feeling cultured. On the contrary, it seems that killing time is what I do. To extinguish time the way you did, Pascal. I imagine a little of how you felt… to kill time… in these dog days… dehydration is slow and predictable.
‘Putain Frey, fucking shake yourself!’ yells Loup when he comes home and sees me recoiled on the floor in a corner, ‘Il faut que tu te secoues!!’
This scares me, and probably him too. He had not seen me like this since La Ciotat, when he was sick with guilt for his brother, and I was not me, but a useless broken thing: his scapegoat and seriously malade.
Now I am stronger. But how can I be a proper wife and helpmate for Loup, when there is this other lover, France, calling to me? I want to be a good wife. Whatever that is. But I want to go and explore. To reclaim the old confident outgoing me. I loathe this agoraphobia and self-pity. Isn’t exploration why I’m here? Isn’t adventure the reason Loup and I met? In the most improbable of places, in a town between a big wet bight, and a big dry plain. But now that Loup and I are married, je fait-semblant as a French femme waiting at home in a hut unbefitting the fairy-tale, waiting for my husband to return from work and rescue me on his white steed.
As if until that moment when I hear his van rumble up over the rocks, all I have is my imagination to validate me. As if all this stuff which happens without Loup, inside my head, this is not real. And then only after, when he opens the cyclone gate, drives in and then reverses back, flattening the rosemary and thyme… why do you have to do that Loup... park your bloody van right in the best spot, where we might sit and say merci dieu as the fireball sun slinks to purple behind the hills, our sacred shared moment I long for all day. Only then, does my concrete life begin.
A fraud.
“She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets… Nothing meant anything.”
Colm Toibin, Brooklyn.
There is something concrete about hearing Nagui’s distinctive voice, and the audacious banter of La Bande Originale… a reminder of the classic film, The Dinner Game. Since my radio listening began first in Auriol, my comprehension has grown from a pitoyable 10% to a respectable 60%. But still, the wit of Daniel Morin and his inimitable counterpoint, Leïla Kaddour-Boudadi will escape me. Their cleverness alone cannot render my life concrete. Or make of me something I am not. Here I am a fraud.
Today when I flick the switch, nothing happens. I flick and re-flick. Nothing. I curse and pick the heavy archaic radio up, and prance around our boxes, extending the aerial, holding it out this way and that as if in a waltz, but nothing. I turn the dial to France Culture, but nothing.
Fucking putain as I hit the radio side on a few times, as if bashing it would make it want to please me. Hopeless. The batteries are dead. No amount of resuscitation will bring back my lifeline
I slam open the front door, half the cracked glass comes flying out; I’m smacked in the face by vicious ultra-violet, high and insolent at noon. Blinded, I trip over the fake grass matting left over from a tennis-club job of Loup's, as it curls and rumples over our palette steps. Tearing over to the shade of our one stunted oak tree, I pull down my panties to wee, when the mistral sends my stream of hot urine straight into my right calf, spraying all over my thongs, and just then I see out of the corner of my eye our mysterious malnourished gypsy neighbour loping towards me, three strides away behind our cyclone fence.
Putain putrid piss!
There are not sufficient words to express my hatred at that particular moment, of misery hut. I whip up my underpants, rip out some thyme and rosemary from the dry ground beside me, and rub it over my leg and thongs; rubbing with fury. Nicely marinated, I turn and give the swarthy skeleton the most disdainful glance I can muster.
This isn’t the first time I have felt uneasy being here alone, not the first time I discovered I was being watched. I retreat back inside, but not without throwing another disapproving look in all directions. Later, Loup tells me that all around knew my habits and movements.
‘Elle n’est pas là? La blonde?’ The solitary men would probe Loup with their lament. Like deprived voyeurs, each time I returned to Australia for several months. ‘She’s not here, the blonde?’ No wonder my agoraphobia.
Now what do I do? No radio, no voices, just interminable silence and this putain mistral.
It’s way too hot to go for a run or even a walk. I’ll do what I used to do, in Auriol, and then in La Ciotat; a worthy occupation, steering me away from the spectre of loneliness and Pascal’s disease.
Sew. To avert homesickness, le mal de pays; I turn my back on my photos, which addle me with anguish and look instead to my fabric box, each fragment a talisman. My eye catches a particular design. Once, back in La Ciotat, I had met a woman out walking who would become another lifeline. Agnés was a couturier of distinction, and her collection of prestigious fabrics was an encyclopaedia of cloth. When she invited me into her sewing room, goose bumps sprung on my skin. Such a wealth of tissu: from hand woven tapestry and upholstery, to sumptuous velvets, crocheted lace, silk threads, glass buttons, satin ribbon, indigo dyes and fairy-tale sequins.
Now in my collection is a legacy of Agnés: a length of upholstery linen, with a bucolic scene drawn flamboyantly in claret red. An old village within a romantic setting; children feed ducks in a pond, a shepherdess tends her flock of sheep, and overlooking and protecting all, rises the church steeple. Unrolling the fabric further, I see a small graveyard behind the church. Something stands out. A large statue of an angel presides over the rest of the cloth. Underneath its folded wings, kneels a woman at a gravestone. Upon the angel’s face, I imagine an expression of benevolence. But neither the stone nor the cloth can say whether this is so. The angel’s line of sight extends beyond the mourning woman to a river, which curves around the village. Two small boys are fishing under a wil
low, and someone is waving to them from a bridge. I cut out that angel, and the surrounds it seems responsible for. I put it aside in a pile of favourite motifs, to be attached together with another, when winter returns.
I too am a hungry voyeur: scavenging the past for sustenance, analysing each episode as if to find landmarks to ground me in this place. For without them, I have no weight or substance here: everything about my being in France is merely incidental. I am simply Loup’s accessory. And the present falls short; full of steaming merde and urine on my legs and no water no radio. Spying gypsies. Plans for the future only lead towards disappointment. Loup and I have stopped making plans, the way we used to when we were naïve and brave.
Inspecting each memory, I study it inside and out, then a rabid insistence takes over, and I re-remember, until The Memory surges out, stands inside the hut facing me, and I am no longer alone.
La Comtoise, from Auriol to Strasbourg, June 2009.
“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering”.
Gilles Deleuze.
Two nights and three days had passed since the gendarmes knocked on the door of Loup’s stable in Auriol. How we lived those next 48 hours I do not know. It is a miracle that your brother had slept at all Pascal. And now he is slumped in the back seat of our rented Renault, eyes closed against the rush of the freeway, and Odette is next to me, her handsome cropped blonde head erect, her peridot-green eyes alert. Astonishing how those eyes of hers remain pools of arresting clarity, displaying none of the haggard redness of my own.
Today is the day I learnt to drive on the Auto-Route. It was imperative that I learn, and learn vite, très vite. Having no suspicion that one-day I would lose that will, it is I at the wheel now, in this summer-fogged, polluted morning; my first shift during our 800-kilometre dash. I am overtaking trucks screaming ‘Calvin Klein’ with metres-high bosoms bursting out from bras and teasing perfect bum cheeks parted across their sides. My adrenalin rises to match the 140 k’s per hour required to flow with the trucks and fast cars. Surprised by my own deftness, I retreat from the in-your-face-flesh, to the inside lane at a more comfortable 120 kph.
Odette and I exchange few words. Every now and again, I will exclaim,
‘Oh Mon Dieu, regards cet château! Comme c’est beau!
Et les montagnes, j'adore!’
‘Mmm, très jolie’ concurs Odette barely audible, barely turning her head. Why on earth would she? Your memory, Pascal sits wedged between us. Not yet a full-grown Memory, (after only three days you are still partly you), the tangible you of flesh and bone and brazil nut eyes and disturbing facts that will soon disturb us beyond our coping.
‘I have my grandmother’s eyes,’ Odette had in happier times boasted, ‘the only green eyes in the family. It is said she was a clairvoyant.’ Leaving unsaid the inference that Odette herself shared her grandmother’s pre-emptive vision. If this was so, your sister must be wracked with ruinous questions for not predicting your act Pascal.
Later, Odette would continue her practice of reading cards, of visiting soothsayers, of channelling her green-eyed grandmother.
‘The clairvoyant says your business will prosper Loup’ announces Odette. ‘She says your old boss will be punished for his treachery and suffer terrible things. That right will win.’
Whilst at the same time, Loup’s former boss was being assured by his clairvoyant that he would prosper in health and wealth. Odette, Loup and I, all know by now that in this world, right rarely wins.
The three lanes of the Auto-Route suddenly become six. Without warning, we are surrounded; all traffic speeding towards a divergence marked by two huge blue signs, one indicating Paris/Dijon to the north-west, and the other Bourg-en-Bresse/Strasbourg to the north-east. Le Rhône flows wide and grey-green on our left, there are barges and chimneys and wind-towers and spires and what appear to be nuclear power stations clamouring its shores. The tunnels that lead to Lyon threaten to engulf our tiny Renault and I hope neither Odette nor slumbering Loup notice that I am in a cold sweat, scanning for an eject button. The necessity to act decisively saves me. I choose the right lane: we torpedo down a tunnel along with the Calvin Klein lingerie, with pastel-coloured Fiat’s tied up in three tiers heading for northern Europe like a top-heavy wedding cake, and I imagine the mess if we all emerge and collide with the German ‘Reinheitsgebot’ beer barrelling towards us in the southbound lanes.
‘My turn now’ Loup uncurls an hour later from the back seat. ‘Pull in here, at the next aire de repos.’
A monster sculpture of a rooster signals our arrival to the rest stop at Bourg-en-Bresse. We pull up opposite the C K breasts and buttocks, which wake Loup up properly.
‘On y va pour un café?’ I suggest, needing a chocolate hit. The two siblings exchange some words beyond my grasp of French, as we all head for the massive roadhouse. The afternoon has got progressively more humid, the farther north we travel. My t-shirt is wet from the drive. We sit in the shade while Loup sips his espresso and absent-mindedly lick our ice creams. I watch bemused as couples come and go, cigarettes in their mouths, the women especially. Even on the Auto-Route, the women are dressed up in high heels and exceptionally tight pants. I wonder about the inverted wedge between their legs. The discomfort. ‘Camel-toes’, my daughters taught me when they were too young to know.
‘On y va, we’d better go,’ Loup slowly rises, and he and his sister, two tall, at times emaciated, string beans stride to the car. In a different time, I would complain about their fortunate metabolism and body shape. They shared the luck of never gaining weight. Pascal had simply worked his body to perfection. Now was not the time to accuse them of being lucky.
‘Only four hours to go’, says Odette. And that was the extent of our conversation. I stayed in the front with Loup, and Odette curled up in the back, clamming shut. Not surprisingly. The closer we got to Strasbourg, the more solemn our trio became. I wound the window down. Inside the car we are trapped with unanswerable questions; the profile of my husband’s face rigid, his usual humour obliterated. Odette is a master at organisation. Prior to leaving, she had drawn up a plan of all the things we needed to accomplish. Dutiful things, mundane things, downright horrific things. As our car entered the familiar Rues of their childhood city, I sensed a subtle change. In both the siblings. Odette’s list of things giving them a mission to accomplish and a sense of relief that they could now face their foe?
The first thing on Odette’s list was to find some cheap accommodation. So we circled the periphery of the city, skirting past trams and well used bike paths and parks and rivers and both old and new buildings which reminded me of my home-city, Melbourne. A difference: vivid green fields and tall heads of corn crammed between steeple-capped villages and peripheral highways. And Germany, looking on from the other bank of the Rhine.
‘Voilà, there it is… le centre commercial… that’s where the motel is.’
At least it wasn’t a Formula One, the cheapest, where sharing the bathroom and checking your mattress for bed bugs was obligatory. No, this one was clean and we did have some space. Whilst unpacking, I regarded my belle-soeur not simply dumping her bag, as I might, but laying out her folded clothes with precision, even her underwear, which was mathematically compressed. After that, we did the second thing on the list. We strolled through the streets of soulless shops, a suburb of department stores. We are arrested by a neon sign pulsating, ‘Buffalo Grill’. Not the kind of place Loup or Odette or I would ever go in our right minds.
The décor inside helped us forget why we were not in our right minds. A corny western movie: where eating God-blessed juicy steak and potatoes oozing with sour cream and waitresses with plaits and booths with gingham cushions helped you forget the nasty things you had to do tomorrow. And even though we weren’t hungry, we hoed into mounds of apple pie and fake chantilly cream and I remember gazing around the crowded cubicles wondering whether we were not alone in stuffing our faces to supress some silent suffering
. As if the fat of animals and caramel and schnapps could help us all forget.
For some reason, Odette decided that Loup should sleep downstairs on the double bed, and she and I should share the loft in our single beds. Loup did not disagree; he rarely does with his much older sister. But I did lie hot and awake in that airless attic wondering why I could not sneak down and lie next to the skin of my husband. To quietly place my hand on that smooth crescent between his neck and his shoulder as he lay with his back to me. To cup my fingers over his collarbone and squeeze gently, just so he knew he was loved. Did any of us that night have the right to feel loved?
The third thing Odette and Loup have to do is the worst. My role is to watch and wait. We are summoned to the Hôtel de Police Nationale in Strasbourg. The day is hot, unpleasantly so. The ‘Hôtel’ in this case is not a place you go to relax and share a beer, rather it is the police headquarters of a large City. Criminal Police. I watch Odette and Loup disappear up vast white steps, into the imposing white building. Its sculpted form reminds me incongruously of a cruise ship: curved white lines and rows of infinite windows. I have been asked to stay by the car in case their appointment takes longer and we outstay the parking meter. The surrounding area is genteel in the elegant manner of an old European city. Across the road are the river and the Place d’Étoile. Various costumes and skins mingle in a kaleidoscope of colour under trembling aspens and golden elms and I am reminded once again of my hometown.
But it is unbearable being apart from Loup. So I check the car and then climb the stairs in search of the salle d’attente. Still in the waiting room, Odette and Loup look wan, putty-grey against the white walls. I prop next to Loup and take his limp hand in mine. Despite the heat, his fingers are icicles. We sit and stare at the empty space behind the open door. There is no sense of time progressing. Eventually a furrowed brow on hunched shoulders, a tall man stoops through the doorway.
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