A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Thatching Mme. Vera’s, 1968. Photo Mary Norris

  “I am monarch of all I survey,” I murmured to myself grimly, feeling more like Ozymandias than the shipwrecked Alexander Selkirk, better known under the alias Robinson Crusoe. Now thoroughly disheartened, I’d come back up to the house thinking I had better try to control something. From chests and closets I pulled rugs and curtains to make the entire first floor seem like a place that someone might live in on purpose. I hauled armloads of purple foxglove out of the woods—some with stems as tall as six feet—to give life and color to the interior, making a huge flourish of them on the table in the dining room, where they reached up like leaning caryatids to uphold the ceiling. Yellow broom was flowering in the woods, Planta genista, which the ancestors of England’s Henry V had worn into battle on both sides of the Channel. They’d swept through this country with its blossoms stuck in their bonnets, leading to their family nickname, Plantagenet. Others—noncombatants—had, more significantly for the cause of civilization, made besoms of the same tough plant. I cut some of that also.

  Next I walked around the first-floor rooms again, pointedly not looking for that wicker tray but still not coming upon it. Maybe the house was shabby, but shabby I had never minded; the illusion that the place was inhabited did me good.

  One thing having led to another the day before, I had not got upstairs yet by the time I called Julia. I let her know there was nothing to collect on my flight insurance and waited, ready for her standard opening, “Is it beautiful?”

  “There’s still the flight back,” Julia warned. She’d missed her cue. Instead of Is it beautiful? she was intent on the romance of air travel. She’d been talking with a friend who’d told her an airplane story she was eager to share. “It was a Chinese airline,” she said, “but still…”

  The narrative concerned a passenger plane that was flying over Szechuan when the pilot and copilot ran into the passenger compartment to check on some more-alarming-than-usual noise or smell. The door to their cabin flopped shut behind them and locked automatically to protect the cabin and controls from interference by hijackers—or, now, the pilot and copilot. As the stewardesses continued to bow along the aisles serving tea, the officers attacked the cockpit’s door with fire axes while the plane …

  “Jesus, you have to work your IQ down the bell curve until you get it way below the idiot level to ride an airplane. And how is everything there?” Julia asked with eager suspicion.

  I began an enthusiastically favorable commentary on the weather and the solitude.

  “That bad, eh?” Julia said.

  “It’s beautiful,” I reminded her.

  “Never mind beautiful,” she replied. “Beautiful is always someone else’s.”

  After that I gave in to jet lag, which the French call le décalage horaire—a décalage being, according to my dictionary, an unwedging or shifting of the zero.…

  TEN

  My night visitor meant that the next day, my second in Mesnil, I had to go to Pont l’Evêque, though I had not planned to leave the farm at all today. I did not, however, want the house to fill up with captive owls before the friends who were to rent it arrived. Animals keep strict routines: just as the wild sow and her young were liable to reappear at the same time in the same place at regular intervals (though not necessarily each morning), the owl might settle back into the dining room.

  Smoke rose from Mme. Vera’s chimney, but she herself was not visible when I looked outside, and I didn’t go down to raise her. She knew I was here, and in due course she’d appear. Since we were such close neighbors, we were better off keeping out of each other’s hair. After I cleaned up some of the fallen objects and had coffee, I drove my car down the driveway and into another amazing day of bright heat.

  I kept meaning to stow an English-French dictionary in the car, but I generally forgot this until I was parked in front of M. Thouroude’s hardware store. One of my primary functions in Normandy had long been to worry M. Thouroude, who, eager to help, invariably tried first to get me to explain to him what I planned to do, and then to persuade me not to.

  Mme. Vera’s, 1995. Photo by author

  As an American, I was weaned on self-service, for which the French term is, conveniently enough, le self-service (since it was not a French idea in the first place, no accommodation is made for it in the language of Racine). Likewise as an American, I am never fully prepared for the intimate role assumed by the small French merchant in any transaction. The first time Julia and I went together into a fabric store (in Lisieux), to buy curtain material for M. Braye’s house, which we were working on—this was in the 1970s, after the Brayes died—we were met by two smiling, nicely dressed women who stood in front of a wall faced with closed drawers. Aside from the shop sign claiming they sold cloth, there was nothing whatever to see or point to—indeed nothing visible at all, apart from a large pair of shears on a counter, to prove that cloth of any kind was to be had here. When in France, Julia usually did her shopping by acting out what she wanted; she got on fine when it came to artichokes, eggs, or fish, but imitating the fabrics and patterns she had in mind was harder. And never, ever, must the customer touch the goods once the salesperson was tricked into showing them.

  In France, the customer is never right. Even if we succeeded in buying something we wanted, which after all Madame had seemed prepared to sell, we had not won. When the bell on the shop door clanged on our departure, it was not with the cheerful peal that had first welcomed the victims, but rather with a mild reproving clang of dismay.

  The first time I went into Lefebvre-Foinet, a French color-merchant’s in Paris, intending to buy stretcher bars and canvas, I was asked, “What does Monsieur intend to paint?” It was as if, looking to buy a pair of socks, I must, before the clerk would risk her honor by showing me the garments, answer the question “And in what circumstances will Monsieur wear the socks?”

  My French, never very good, became much worse in confrontation, but I managed to express bewilderment. The salesperson quickly understood that I was at a loss and explained with another question: “Is it landscape Monsieur wishes to execute, or seascape, or a portrait?” (“Paysage, marine, ou figure?”)

  Not sure myself what I might paint, I certainly did not think it was any of her business. I might well stare at the naked canvas (toile vierge) until its virginity disturbed me more than anything I might do to violate it. The salesperson, with the exquisite, exasperated, kindly patience that comes only with generations of training, pulled out a card on which were printed all the dimensions available in stretched canvas, divided into three categories. The paysage selection comprised one kind of oblong; the marine another, more horizontal; the figure yet a third, more square.

  I pointed to a vertical dimension from the figure category and a horizontal from the paysage. “Suppose I want to make a canvas this by this?”

  “Ah non, Monsieur,” she told me. “Ça ne se fait pas. C’est une fausse mesure.” (“That is not done. That dimension is false, untrue, erroneous, wrong, spurious, base, counterfeit, forged, fictitious, sham, insincere, treacherous, deceitful, or equivocal.”) She had me where she wanted me.

  She glanced about her, signaling the patron by means of rapid eye movements. He came forward, smiling like a man with a blackjack in his pocket. I purchased some figure canvases and painted landscape on them.

  Our American backgrounds made us clumsy in the French economy. We tiptoed around all the time, thus accidentally proving we had been mal élevés (ill brought up). The essence of an orderly society demands that each member know his or her place; otherwise, what can be the value of specialization? Therefore glass for the window is sold not at the quincaillerie, where fence posts may be had, but at the droguerie, where only a fool would seek to buy aspirin; it must then be handed over to a vitrier to be installed. Carpentry, for its part, should be done by a menuisier or a charpentier (depending on the grade of work required), never by the owner of the home.

  Now,
at M. Thouroude’s quincaillerie in Pont l’Evêque, I realized that once again I did not have my dictionary with me and did not know what to call what I wanted; and remembered, too, that M. Thouroude had been watching for me since last summer, when I had let it slip within his hearing that rather than spending four hundred dollars on a ladder so as to replace some lost slates on the auvent, I proposed to make one myself using tree branches from the woods, relying only on the assistance of my equally misguided son Christopher (my eldest), who had come with me. M. Thouroude had begged me to be prudent, writing down the names and addresses of two roofers he recommended and assuring me that this was a matter for a professional. If I was not prepared at once to invest in repairs to the slate facing, well, all right: I could tell the roofer that my intention was to have the slates replaced someday. The roofer would merely drape the house in plastic until Monsieur was ready. Only over his own protest did M. Thouroude consent to sell me tar paper, roofing nails, and no ladder.

  Steeling myself, I entered the quincaillerie. M. Thouroude, a tall, lean man in overalls, exactly the same age he had always been, came over to greet me—With a sad grin of sympathetic condolence? I wondered, or was I being overly sensitive?—“Monsieur? Vous désirez?”

  I looked around the shop but saw nothing to point to among the firebacks, drill sets, spades, and spools of chain. Forced to fall back on narrative, I explained the problem of the owl. M. Thouroude listened with care and suggested that I close my windows before retiring. After I explained further, he wondered aloud if I planned to put up a fence around my house in order to keep the owls from entering.

  No, I replied; the problem was the chimney. “Ah, well,” M. Thouroude said, “there are persons who specialize in such things as chimneys. Do not take matters into your own hands, Monsieur, I beg you. What you want is a couvreur [roofer] who will install a grille of the correct size at the top of your chimney. I can recommend two roofers. Talk to them both, then choose one.”

  No, I would do it myself, I said. I began to describe what I had in mind. The line of waiting customers grew and carefully appeared not to be listening. “But you would need to get up to the top of the chimney,” M. Thouroude protested suspiciously. “You might fall.” I did not flatter myself that he recalled my proposal to make my own ladder; nor, equally, could I flatter myself that he did not remember it.

  When he at last understood that I was not to be dissuaded, M. Thouroude led me to the shed across the courtyard next to his shop, as I explained that I did not intend to risk my life in dealing with my owl problem. Spotting a tall roll of chicken wire resting among metal fence posts, scythes, posthole diggers, barbed wire, sacks of cement, ladders, stakes, and handles, I told him to cut me five meters. M. Thouroude insisted that for my own good, he must know how I intended to proceed.

  “I’m going to roll it and stuff it up the chimney,” I told him.

  M. Thouroude shook his head and snipped dolefully: He would rather sell me nothing at all than participate in such a grave miscarriage of hardware. “The owls will continue to descend your chimney,” he threatened. “And now, finding this wire for a foundation, they will build their nests on it and thus your chimney will fill with twigs and feathers and you will set fire to your house.”

  He wrote, with pencil on a paper bag, the names and addresses and phone numbers of two roofers whom he suggested I consult instead of going ahead with my rash strategy. He told me exactly how to find them, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. The line of customers waited, ostentatiously not taking notes, while M. Thouroude, advising, coiled my wire, tied it with twine, and wrapped it in heavy brown paper. He accepted my money and wrote out a receipt. For seven dollars I had obtained thirty minutes’ worth of undivided attention from an expert.

  ELEVEN

  On my way back to the farm, I was delayed by cattle in the drive. The farmer who rented the fields raised beef, which was more and more the usual practice in these parts, replacing dairy farming. Milk products were subsidized, but dairy was labor-intensive, and the labor itself unremitting. Until five years earlier, Mme. Vera had milked her own twenty-some cows twice a day, by hand. My son Christopher (then fourteen) helped her the summer he stopped drinking milk. That same summer he learned that it was possible to eat twelve croissants at a sitting. He also learned everything about artificial insemination, as well as the other method applauded by the Pope of Rome, and about births and stillbirths and the thousand intimate ways cows and their excrement can intermingle.

  What faced me in the drive—it was toward noon, still hot and dry, when I returned from my errand—was a bull, a couple of males too old for veal and too young for stud, and a passel of heifers, cows, and calves, the youngest of whom were totteringly new.

  We had never found a way to keep the fences intact. Perhaps, as one friend, ecologically minded as only an urban visitor could be, had once suggested, they were contrary to the spirit of the place. The ones we built along the driveway immediately succumbed to mysterious maladies. According to the rental contract, it was the tenant’s responsibility to maintain the fences. “Ces gens là, il faut les prendre par le coeur” (“These people, you have to grab them by the heart”), my mother once said, quoting a friend of hers from an older generation on how to get something done in the country. In my impetuous American way, I told my mother that maybe her friend was reaching too high.

  The formal terms of our relationship—that is, of the relationship between Mme. Tonnelier, renter, and my mother, hereditary proprietor—were still maintained under the language of the relevant articles of the Code Civil of 1804, a replacement for the forelock-tugging, droit-du-seigneur approach of the old Norman usages as altered by the dictates of the newly created centralized state. Twice yearly, on the feast of Saint Michael (September 29) and on Christmas Day, in equal installments, rent was due to the tune of 180 kilograms of farmer’s butter and 260 kilograms of second-rate beef (viande de boeuf en deuxième qualité), net weight. Fortunately for us, current practice was to render this fermage in its cash equivalent.

  I herded the second-rate beasts out of the way with the car’s horn. The fields along the driveway were busy with magpies, and I both saw and heard the pair of hawks hunting above as I drove up toward the house. Mme. Vera was busy in the fenced yard in front of her house, a hundred feet from mine, washing the slab of cement that was part of her courtyard with a stiff broom and water from a hose, under a broad sky of brilliant blue across which fat clouds rushed, high up and in opposite directions to each other, making fast shadows swirl across the green hillside, as if the world were being stirred with a long-handled spoon.

  Mme. Vera’s courtyard, 1988. Photo Walter Chapin

  Mme. Vera was surrounded by dogs, ducks, and chickens, as well as a slinking outrider of feral cats. I drove the car down to the broad area next to the thatched garage attached to her house, originally built for the Friesekes’ Ford and later considered by my parents as a suitable place to store the Citroën during the winter. The spirit of the place preferred otherwise, however, so they arranged for active storage with the Citroën garagiste in Pont l’Evêque, from whom I had hidden the day before. The addition at the far end of her cottage had been built on as my grandfather’s studio, though he often painted in the house. That space, like the garage and much of the remainder of Mme. Vera’s quarters, now served as a general storage area and chicken run.

  Mme. Vera’s courtyard, 1988. Photo Walter Chapin

  Mme. Vera threw her arms around me and we began to exchange kisses. A woman of eighty who had lived a hard life for many years, she had blossomed with old age and widowhood. Today she was wearing a pretty dress printed with pink flowers. I had noticed some of her laundry hanging on the metal clothesline next to my house when I arrived; by the time I looked out in the morning, it had migrated to her own line, further down the hill. Mme. Vera was now bent almost as badly as her husband had been in his time, and her husband’s father, M. Braye; but she seemed healthy. Her hands were
big and square and twisted, and she still exuded a pleasant smell of cider mixed with milk just on the edge of turning sour.

  I hunkered down (mentally) and prepared to converse. In talking with Mme. Vera, the language was not the problem, since she was a fellow foreigner and spoke French more clearly than I had a right to expect (she was also, it was said, fluent in Russian, Polish, and German); rather, it was the content. Mme. Vera was permanently inspired by disaster, and filled with rumor. She had an unyielding memory for catastrophe but with the cruel advance of age had gradually lost her sense of time as a discipline by which to organize phenomena, so that all past events now existed in her conversation, unless this was a function of my own confusion, as if they had happened only the day before yesterday. She and I were tied together by links of mutual gratitude and wariness extending many years into the past. Because I was contemplating becoming of the owning, while she would remain of the renting, class, I could not avoid taking in many of her observations with a guilty sense that it was up to me to set matters right. We swapped good wishes and family information before she started telling me her news, acting it out as she narrated it.

  Ah, the things that had happened! There had been terrible storms. Two cows had been struck by lightning and had to be buried—as everyone knew, a cow struck by lightning could not be eaten. The meat perished instantly! The ground had been so wet that nothing could be planted. All the seeds had rotted. Everything had died in the ground. It was a disaster. Because of the drought, everything had withered and died. The cows that lived had got infections and aborted. Bombs had fallen back in the woods, and a piece of the house had been knocked off. There were almost no rabbits. Dead, all dead. Barely a chicken was left. A tourist had fired a rifle at her goats. Unspeakable! Everything was so expensive. How could a person eat? There was no sugar anywhere. Prices for beasts had gone down, and a man had died before the ambulance could reach him. Life was hard. The linden trees had gone, with one falling limb almost killing a child.