by Ward Just
These four were rough, not casual hikers out for a Sunday stroll. She thought probably they were smugglers of drugs since they did not carry heavy packs. Whatever contraband they were transporting was lightweight, probably penny-ante goods, though the men themselves had an air of seriousness about them. She wondered if they were Berbers. They were dark-skinned and bearded, generally unkempt. She did not like the sound of their language, guttural and hard-edged, a sneering language, no music in it. The one with the lisp spoke so softly he could barely be heard, but his voice was coarse all the same, a sandpaper voice filled with menace. His tone reminded her of her long-absent father, a man whose anger was so deep it seemed prehistoric, the dumb anger of beasts, indiscriminate anger on eternal simmer until suddenly it boiled over. He had a head filled with golden curls and transparent blue eyes. Her father's soft voice and sly smile were always an announcement of violence, his accusation a quotation from Scripture, most often Psalm Forty-seven: For The Lord Most High Is Terrible. He Is A Great King Over All The Earth. He Shall Subdue The People Under Us, And The Nations Under Our Feet. He Shall Choose Our Inheritance For Us ... Her father recited from the Bible as he advanced from one room to the next, her mother retreating before him, hissing like a cat; and then a clamor, a table overturned, a dish smashed, and her father's low monotone. Florette was told to remain in her room until the storm passed but she never forgot her father's words and her mother's cat-hiss, the house filled with discord. He is not one of us, her mother said. He is an alien. Who knows where he comes from or who made him. He said he was born in the Alsace, son of a missionary. His name was Franc DuFour. His father's mission was in one of the former German colonies in East Africa. He worked with the heathen who lived on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. One day the father went away to Africa and never returned. The missionary's son turned up in St. Michel du Valcabrère, a dealer in farm implements, which he sold from the back of a prewar Renault truck.
As Franc was attractive, her mother said, I married him.
I did not know he was a lunatic.
I thought he would provide for us.
Instead, he had a bad outlook on life.
I think he was badly brought up.
Soon enough, Florette and her mother went to live with Tante Christine in Toulouse. When they heard that Franc DuFour had left St. Michel du Valcabrère—a dispute with a farmer over an invoice—they returned to the house in the village. Florette never saw her father again. She was just five years old and her mother told her to forget about him. He was a lunatic with a bad attitude. He was violent and untrustworthy, mean with money. Pretend he does not exist, she said. And that was what Florette did and after a time she ceased to think about him in any specific way, except when she heard a soft voice with a lisp. Then he returned to her whole, his head full of golden curls, his ice-blue eyes, his heavy hands and wide shoulders, his broad brow, and his terrifying words from the Bible. She remembered the only phrase that he had ever said to her personally. She had no recollection of the occasion, only the words themselves: "Tidy up." Those must have been the words he lived by. Florette was distressed that the memory of her father was with her now. She did not want his memory anywhere near her but when she opened her eyes he was still there in the darkness, his bulk, his heavy brow, and his shoulders as wide as an ax handle, his lisp when he recited Psalm Forty-seven, and of course the curls and the evident necessity to tidy up. Her mother told her he was dead and Florette wanted to believe her, but didn't, quite. Well, they were both gone except for the life they maintained in Florette's imagination. This gave her an obscure satisfaction. She was lying injured on pine needles in the snow, her mind teeming with stories. They were her own stories, personal property. No one could take them from her. The conquistador's lisp had reminded her of her father and suddenly her father was alive in her mind. Risen from the dead. They were a family again, if only hallucinatory. He could not harm her, so she reconsidered and welcomed him to her dreams, a ghost from the distant past. She was certain now that she would be all right if she kept her nerve, lived inside herself, and never doubted that help would come. Florette struggled unsuccessfully to get comfortable, wrapped her arms around her chest, and closed her eyes. Light danced behind her eyelids.
When she woke, she was thinking of Thomas. The night was so dark he would never find her unless he stumbled on their bivouac, perhaps heard the men's voices or smelled their tobacco. Surely by this time he would have realized she was lost and set about organizing a proper search. He knew the trail very well. On Sunday afternoons Thomas often came walking with her, carrying a blackthorn stick and telling amusing stories as they ascended the trail, snow glittering on the slopes of the high mountains to the south, Catalonia beyond. They rarely met anyone on the trail and always returned before nightfall. Florette insisted on it. Mountains were unsafe after dark and the Pyrenees were no exception, inhabited as they were by vengeful gods without conscience. So Thomas would know her approximate location and there had always been a kind of sixth sense between them similar to the shared oneness of identical twins. They noticed when things were out of place and read each other's moods as easily as they read the weather; and they knew when not to inquire too closely on those occasions when there was silence at the other end. An explanation would come in due course. But night had fallen and there was no sign of Thomas. She thought she had never seen a blacker night, as if the gods had pulled a curtain over the heavens.
She tried to imagine him now with his American friends, the table disheveled, candles guttering, something on the stereo, Broadway show tunes or a hummable opera, La Bohème or Cavalleria Rusticana, songs by Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. The friends did not speak good French so their conversation was in rapid English, usually politics, difficult for her to follow even when Thomas turned to her and translated. Capitalism's responsibility for the turbulence of the modern world, its heedlessness and chaos, its savagery, its utter self-absorption, capitalism the canary in the mineshaft. But it's what we have, isn't it? No turning the clocks back. Against the jihadists, we have capitalism. Will money trump faith? They all had stories of catastrophe from remote parts of the world, Thomas filling glass after glass of Corbières as they made their way through the cauldron of cassoulet. Bernhard Sindelar had stories from NATO headquarters and the various security services of Europe and elsewhere. Russ Conlon, overweight and semiretired, was content to eat and contribute anecdotes from unnamed friends at Interpol and the Paris bourse. Florette's mind wandered as she gazed out the window at the golden afternoon, the sky a washed-out blue, the trees beginning to turn. Autumn in Aquitaine was a natural masterpiece. What a mistake to remain indoors. When Bernhard lapsed into German, Florette knew the men were back in the factories of the small Wisconsin town they grew up in, red brick factories now abandoned, windows shattered, industrial locks rusting on the Cyclone fence that protected the property from vandals, though there was nothing left to vandalize and no one to care if there were. Capitalism's song: the downtown began to decay and then, overnight it seemed, the streets were full of Puerto Ricans and no one knew what there was about wintry LaBarre, Wisconsin, that would attract people from the sunny Caribbean—and here Thomas turned to her and explained that the Puerto Ricans had been there all along, the grandchildren of workers imported to do manual labor at the wire mill and the foundry during the Second World War, labor brought by rail from Miami on the very same tracks that now lay rusting beside the clapped-out factories that during the war had been running eighteen-hour shifts, good wages, good benefits, job security, war's prosperity. And now the grandchildren were grown up with children of their own who lived in a community with a dead economy. Now they called it an enterprise zone. Famous photographers came to take pictures of the factories, exquisite examples of early-twentieth-century industrial design. Form followed function and how quaint it all seemed, as quaint as a tin lunchbucket. Capitalism's epitaph: form followed function and sometime around 1955 the money evaporated, went west, went south, wen
t back to Wall Street, Qué pasa, hombre? Qué pasa? And that was how a community founded by central European immigrants came to be mostly Hispanic, growing old together in an enterprise zone. Florette enjoyed listening to them speak of the village where they grew up, as exotic to her as Moscow, if Moscow had a dozen nationalities all crowded together in one small space. How ever did they manage it? What means "clapped-out factory"?
Florette had cleared the dishes, made a pot of coffee, and slipped out the back door for her walk, having a pretty good idea that the conversation would remain in LaBarre, Wisconsin, of which she had heard quite enough. Thomas had thoughtfully located his hometown in an atlas but she could not visualize it, a black dot in an unfamiliar region of an immense country. A river with an unpronounceable Indian name ran nearby, flowing into a great lake. Minnesota was north, Iowa west; such strange place names. St. Michel du Valcabrère had not changed since she was a girl and her mother said the same thing, yet it was also true that tourists came to take photographs of the church and the pretty square and the memorial to the fallen of the Great War, Mort pour la France, thinking them quaint. She had paused at the kitchen door, pleased by the afternoon light streaming into the courtyard, in use since the middle of the eighteenth century, scuffed cobblestones the size of melons underfoot. Thomas and his friends were speaking a kind of pidgin German, remembering their childhoods in once prosperous LaBarre before the Hispanic Anschluss. Russ was the one who had kept up, exchanging Christmas cards with high school classmates, privy to the news: one passed away, another in jail, a third a superior-court judge. Beautiful town to grow up in, Russ said, no town to stay in; and so we left it without a thought because there was nothing to look forward to except decline, and now we remember it as a kind of lazy American paradise where the days seemed to go on forever to the rhythm of crickets. Florette thought America had a cult of restlessness, people moving on as a matter of course. If you didn't like the hand you were dealt—the wife, the job, the color of your hair or the shape of your bosom—you dealt yourself another. She herself had shuffled the cards, bewitched by an article in Paris-Match that described a couturier in Place Vendôme, merchant to the haute monde. But when the chance came to go to Paris she had done nothing. She had thrown in her hand. Place Vendôme was not beyond her wildest dreams, in fact it was her wildest dream; but it was only a dream and so she had stayed behind.
In the spirit of a mariner who wished above all else to visit the caves at Altamira, Florette had tried to encourage Thomas to take her to America, New York City with a side trip to LaBarre. You haven't seen your country in ages, she said. Aren't you curious to see what's become of it? How people are getting on since the attacks? The sense they make of them? I suppose they won't like it when you tell them you live in France. Probably they'll think you're a traitor and have changed sides. But still. So much has happened in so short a time. Aren't you interested? He looked at her with a strange smile and said, There isn't anyone I want to see in America. Maybe sometime, for you. But sometime never arrived because both she and Thomas were gripped by the stubborn inertia that came with living in an out-of-the-way place, hard to get into or out of. Mountains limited the horizon. Naturally there was more to it than that but Florette did not feel she could insist. She had lived all her life in St. Michel du Valcabrère and a few more months or years would make no difference. In any case, they were content where they were. Florette had never been outside France and only recently had begun to think about travel to America. She wanted to see the empty place where the twin towers once stood and see the Statue of Liberty up close. She wanted to stay in a fine hotel and ride a Fifth Avenue bus and visit Saks. She wanted to go to the opera in a long black dress, Thomas in a tuxedo. And she wanted a long detour to Thomas's birthplace. She wondered if provincial LaBarre had a town square with a stone monument to the fallen, Mort pour l'Amérique, and a church that was as beautiful as the one in her square.
Florette moved stiffly on the stretcher and put her hands to her temples. She could not remember the name of the church, the one she was baptized in and attended every Sunday of her life. She closed her eyes and concentrated hard but the place in her mind where the church was, was suddenly blank. She did not understand how this could be. She thought and thought and when she finished thinking she looked up with an expression of the most poignant embarrassment.
Florette noticed pinpoints of light in the forest and knew they were smoking again. The Gitanes smell reached her, hung a moment, and disappeared. She thought she heard one of them laugh but dismissed it as her overheated imagination. These were not men who laughed casually, unlike Thomas's rowdy American friends. She closed her eyes, knowing her mind was wandering, reeling actually, stuttering from one subject to another. Her mind seemed to have a will of its own. She was so very cold, it was hard for her to concentrate. She wanted desperately to pee but did not know how to go about it. She was not all in one piece but scattered, a skein of yarn that had unraveled. She knew she must stay alert so that she could call to Thomas when he came for her with the men from the village. His sixth sense would tell him she was injured and in danger. Thomas would never allow her to be mistreated. She missed him so, his good humor and generosity, his easiness, his sincerity in most things, his superstitions (a knock on wood, his habit of placing pebbles on the gravestones of strangers) despite his professed atheism, his touch, and his excitement. She even missed his absent-mindedness, his habit of being there and not-there at the same time; she called it his equilibrium. She wished he took better care of himself and like all men he covered things up. As the women in the village said, his shoes were full of stones. Gaps in the biography, Thomas called it. Missing years, years that had dropped from sight, interregnum years when he was, as he said, absent without leave. Out of the way. In the evening after dinner he would disappear into his not-there state, a private smile appearing from nowhere, lingering awhile before it disappeared and he took up his book once again, and settled in. The smile infuriated her; you could almost hear the rustle of bedsheets. She didn't mind that he'd had a prior life, everyone did. He was past fifty when she met him and past sixty when they married, his manner suggesting a life very much spent in the world. His face looked it: laugh lines in combat with worry lines, the laugh lines winning but only barely. However, she did not like the private smile. One night she asked him about it, what he was thinking when he was smiling privately. And he told her it was a passage in the book he was reading and then he recited the passage. Of course he knew what she was asking and added that he had drawn a line between past and present, the present beginning the winter Sunday when they met in the church at St. Michel du Valcabrère and walked across the square to the café for a tisane. Remember the snowflakes in the air? The café windows were misted over. Most everyone wore their Sunday clothes, dark suits for the men, flowered dresses for the women. He had decided not to go to Mass that day but promised to meet her outside when it was over. He sometimes went to Mass because he liked the music and the carved figures of the saints behind the altar, St. Michel's foot worn smooth by the touch of thumbs, supposedly good luck, a propitious thumb-touch. They walked across the square to the café and took the table next to the pinball machine. Old Bardèche arrived with the tisane almost at once, smiling, complimenting Florette on her dress.
Thomas kept his right hand in his jacket pocket, fingering the small square box that contained an engagement ring. He had decided to ask her to marry him but did not know exactly how to go about it. He was as nervous as a teenager. Thomas reminded her of the first day they met and had gone across the square to the café and he had explained to her that he was an artist, a portraitist who had traveled all his life and was content now to settle in a farmhouse in the country. And she had said yes, she knew his house, the property next to the Englishman. Florette remembered that Thomas lit her cigarette with a gold lighter and gave her the lighter, and the next day they went for a walk on the mountain, trading personal histories; and a week after that she moved
from her little house in the village to his farmhouse next to the reclusive Englishman's. They had not been apart since. That afternoon Thomas reached into his jacket pocket and said, I have something for you—