A Country Between

by Stephanie Saldaña

  We slept. When we awakened, the sea was visible out the windows of the train, a strange comfort after the desert, blue and alive. Frédéric unfastened a fountain pen from his notebook and wrote out in neat handwriting:

  My First French Lesson

  Epouvantail

  Scarecrow

  Ami

  Friend

  Douleur

  Pain

  Chanson

  Song

  Jardin

  Garden

  It seemed an odd assortment of words from which to start, when I spoke no French at all. I tried, softly, to pronounce them in turn: the eur and on strange on my tongue.

  Douleur. Chanson.

  I looked up at the man who would be my husband, and who I had only really known as a novice monk in a monastery. I asked him, hesitantly, if he could tell me his middle name.

  France

  If life could follow a perfect narrative, the story would end there: with your father and me together, spending the rest of our lives happily married in France. But life does not follow a perfect narrative, and at times it does not seem to follow any arc at all. For me, meeting your father was a complete rupture from the past. The rest was less moving forward than starting over.

  It would be six long months before our wedding. Father Paolo had wanted us to get married immediately, while we were still in his monastery in the desert, but in a rare act of defiance against my spiritual father, I had flatly refused. One of the complications of falling in love with a novice monk was that, until he’d made his final decision to leave the monastery, I couldn’t tell anyone about him. I was now marrying a man that almost no one in my life even knew existed. I at least had to introduce him to my family first.

  And, in truth, I wanted the fairy tale: the white gown, the flowers, the chapel in the French countryside, the perfect ending to the story of a monk who left his monastery for love. And we all live happily ever after.

  So we scheduled a wedding for May, the soonest that we could realistically assemble friends and family from across the world in Europe. In the meantime, we arrived in France, where we would spend the first months of our life together. Not having spent much time in France, I was under the mistaken impression that the country was composed largely of museums and castles, some postcard version of a Juliette Binoche film in which every street was cobbled and there was little to do but pass the afternoons strolling between bookstores, eating croissants. I was not the first American to make this mistake, and I will not be the last. I would later realize that my error had been watching American films about France instead of French films about France (one of the most famous French love films, Jules et Jim, ends with two of the characters driving themselves off of a cliff). It was far harder to appreciate in person the war-scarred villages, the farm-hardened old men, the cafés with their terrible coffee, and the complexity of a single country bordered by eight others, each region distinctly its own. It would take me years to find all of that complaining endearing rather than frustrating.

  We disembarked from our train in the French countryside of Drôme Provençale to find a ruggedly elegant woman, with a shock of gray hair and fierce blue eyes, approaching us and turning her cheeks to be kissed. I had been expecting a mother-in-law who would either be Coco Chanel or a French version of Julia Child, but Frédéric’s mother was something else. She possessed the hardened assurance of a woman who had raised three children mostly alone, hiked the Himalayas every year for pleasure, made her own alcohol, and had nearly lost her fingers as a teenager from frostbite. She was a force.

  “Bonjour, mon grand,” she sang out to Frédéric.

  She turned to me, kissed me, and then inspected me from what seemed to be the soles of my shoes up to my hastily brushed hair.

  “I bought her Coca-Cola,” she remarked to Frédéric dryly, her way of acknowledging the unfortunate fact that he had brought home an American.

  To be honest, it’s a miracle that we lasted the first week.

  We began our new life in the house of my belle-mère, as she was called in French, in a hamlet in a region I had not known existed until that morning: a cluster of red-roofed cottages surrounded by open fields, with a few horses grazing. It was colder even than the monastery, and with seemingly fewer people living nearby, with a single, small wood stove to heat the house, like I had only seen, I believe, in episodes of Little House on the Prairie. I spent the first day huddled beside the stove, busily rubbing my hands together.

  There was a single clock in the house, hanging in the kitchen, which I soon understood to be intentional. That evening, we sat down to dinner at exactly seven o’clock, for French meals happened on a schedule that was rigidly monastic (the afternoon snack, for instance, is called le quatre-heures—the four o’clock.) I attempted to begin a conversation, but after a few moments, Frédéric’s mother gave up trying to respond in her limited English, and she turned to her son and began speaking French. I had met him in a world where Arabic and English and the occasional Syriac were spoken, and I had rarely heard him speak in his own language. His whole body became animated, and he gestured with his hands, agitated about some subject I could not comprehend.

  For the next hour I sat, understanding nothing of what he said, not wanting to stop him to ask. I had the sense that he was a different person in his own language, a person who I did not yet know. And yet he was the man I was about to marry.

  In vain I thought of the five words he had made me memorize on the train.

  Douleur. Chanson.

  • • •

  We had no home of our own, and almost no money. I had not once considered that, in all of the months I had waited to learn if he would leave the monastery, but now it terrified me. Most of all, we had no idea of what we were doing next. I was beginning to suspect that we had set out on a long-distance journey for which we were woefully unprepared. He had spent three years trying to rid himself of everything that belonged to the world: giving away his guitar to a friend, making gifts of his collection of books, even losing his French identity card (which I thought was unnecessarily dramatic), methodically shedding his material possessions so that he could fulfill the monastic vow of poverty.

  For three years he had lived in a world where he did not handle his own money, where the toll of the bell in the monastery courtyard determined breakfast and lunch and dinnertime. He tried to lose his attachments to everything he could, no matter how small. On days when he fasted, if a guest offered him food, he always accepted it, hoping to overcome even his own desire to hold a fast rather than observe the highest virtue in monasticism—accepting hospitality. His goal, he once told me, was to be invisible to the world, and visible only to God.

  But the inhabited world had no patience for such ideas, and the very qualities that had made him a successful monk in his monastery in the clouds—poverty, obedience, and humility—were handicaps in the world below. I did not dare broach this subject with him, but there was no need, for he understood it intuitively, in the same way that he could watch the sky for patterns to see what storms were approaching.

  Two days after we arrived at his mother’s house, we drove to the nearest village, and I waited outside as he reluctantly walked through the revolving doors of the bank and opened an account under both of our names, into which he deposited what little remained of the money Father Paolo had given us. I had never seen him look so despondent—as though after so many years of his trying to fight it, the world had managed to win after all.

  The next day, a neighbor who remembered a favor that Frédéric had done for him a decade before decided to give us his old car for free, a white Citroën BX with tires that inflated and lifted the body into the air before we could start the ignition, straight out of some children’s science fiction book. It was so old that Frédéric would whisper to it each time he started it, coaxing it to move: “Allez allez, on y va.”

  Only a week had passed, but he had managed to become weighted down to the earth.

&
nbsp; I called my father and announced that I was getting married. In a few weeks we would be coming home. Immediately, he asked me to put Frédéric on the phone.

  “Don’t you have something to ask me, young man?” he demanded.

  Frédéric stumbled. “Yes, of course. But I’m just waiting to ask you when I meet you in person.” He then hung up the phone and turned to me in shock. “Is there something I’m supposed to ask your father?”

  I sighed. While I had clearly watched far too many Hollywood movies, he had not watched nearly enough.

  • • •

  I spent the first two months of our life together watching Frédéric stumble through the inhabited world. We took ambling walks through the forest in the afternoons, and he told me tales about his years wandering the earth. There was a wistful quality to his voice as he recounted them. He had stopped attending school when he was sixteen, working in vineyards and as a musician between voyages, amassing an immense and bizarre amount of knowledge on his own: how to play the Iranian lute and the Armenian duduk, the philosophy behind certain Hindu and Buddhist texts, traditional French folk songs, beekeeping, forestry, a strong opinion of the virtues of Schubert over Chopin, and the Islamic ninety-nine names of God. He had never desired a formal education and had not needed one in the monastery, but he sensed that he would need one in this new life with me. Now, intent on completing his high-school degree before our wedding, he spent his early mornings and late evenings at the dim light of the kitchen table, hunched over books, studying for exams. I did not ask him what he wanted to do with his life, because I suspected that I knew the answer: he wanted to be a desert monk. The fact that he wanted to marry me did not negate the desires of the past, as I had somehow, quite foolishly, imagined it would. It simply made them impossible to fulfill.

  It was a few days before I first discovered rosary beads in the pockets of his jacket when I was gathering clothes for the laundry. They clinked in the way coins or keys might break against one another in the pockets of another man. The second week, on Thursday, I noticed that he was not eating his usual bread and honey for breakfast. When he did not eat lunch either, I understood that he was discreetly continuing his monastic habit of fasting once a week. I awakened in the morning to find him warming himself near the woodstove, wearing his gray monastic cassock, drinking a cup of tea. It had been tailored exactly for his size, and so he had kept it with him. He was the exact vision of the novice monk I had met in the monastery, only without the glow.

  As they might say in Texas: “You can take the man out of the monastery, but you can’t take the monastery out of the man.”

  I had promised Frédéric that I would follow him anywhere in the world, mistakenly thinking that this would ensure us a home together. The problem was that he no longer belonged to the world. The monastery had demanded that he take a vow of poverty, which for other men might have proven difficult. But for a man like Frédéric, the poverty of the desert had been almost effortless. It was no great sacrifice to give up everything he owned in order to spend his life in prayer, among the rockscape and clouds. No, for him this new life was the real poverty, when he was asked to give up his past and become tied once again to the earth.

  I watched him: surveying the sky for incoming rain, motioning to wild rose bushes and edible berries in the forest paths around the house, awakening early to salvage some semblance of solitude. The monastery had concealed both humor and grit, and I came to recognize them slowly. He was hesitant to trust the earth. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side had died from gas in the First World War, and his great-grandfather on his father’s had died of tuberculosis. His grandparents had lived in the high mountains, teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. He took it for granted that the world was harsh and one had to be prepared to navigate it. This skill, it turned out, would be of great use in our life to come.

  I could not keep up, but tried not to get lost entirely. Before dinner, in an effort to be helpful, I began to peel potatoes for soup. I moved quickly, a thick pile of shavings amassing on the countertop. He surveyed me from across the room, then approached wordlessly, placed his hand on top of my right hand, curved the fingers, and showed me how to peel the potato closer to the skin, so as not to lose a single, unnecessary inch.

  • • •

  I wrote. I read. I tried to memorize sentences in French. I planned our wedding.

  “You’re not happy,” he whispered, finding me reading in the corner at night.

  “I’m happy,” I whispered through my tears.

  None of it was as I had imagined. I had not fully comprehended, when I had asked him to leave the monastery, how completely he would have to start over. How lost we both would be.

  He printed a kiss softly on my forehead. I knew that he loved me, but was less certain that it was a love worth starting over for. There were two possibilities: that leaving the monastery to marry me was the most romantic gesture that anyone could hope for, or that one day he would wake up and blame me for what I had asked him to do.

  • • •

  Time did not seem to pass. I thought that we had arrived in the midst of winter, but in fact it had only been its onset, so that each day seemed to slip more deeply into the dark. The only neighbor was a horse who occasionally approached a nearby fence and looked over at us wearily, and a postman who some days came in for tea. Even the sky retreated into itself.

  A few weeks in, Frédéric’s mother caught me, unguarded, staring out the window toward the open fields. The grass outside was glazed with ice, a world in mourning.

  She poured me a cup of tea. There are those moments between women that defy differences. An American marrying her son was unfamiliar to her. A young woman, alone and worried about the future was not.

  She bided her time, sipping out of her mug. She looked out at the field with me, but as though to see through it, to another time.

  “You know, Frédéric—when he was a child, he was always friends with that one boy in his class who no one else would play with. He was always drawn to—what do you call them in English? The ones who do not belong.”

  “To outcasts?”

  “Oui, to outcasts. Since as long as I could remember, that boy followed his own path.”

  I smiled at the amount of English she could speak when she put her mind to it.

  “Don’t worry,” she continued. “I can understand why you’re worried, but you don’t need to be. I was worried about him all the time. When he was nineteen years old, and he came back from traveling in India, I told him that he needed to immediately go out and look for a job.” She smiled. “He told me not to worry. But we fought. I thought that he was living in a dream world.” She shook her head. “But then someone called him the very same day and offered him work.” She placed her hand on my shoulder, in the brief solidarity of two women who both loved the same mysterious and somewhat impossible man.

  “He always finds a way, that boy,” she concluded, her voice both wistful and defiant. “Il est né sous une bonne étoile.” He was born beneath a lucky star.

  A Game of Chess

  That December, we traveled to Texas so that my father could meet Frédéric at last. In typical fashion, my father was waiting for us at the airport, wearing a red-striped shirt, and it struck me that in France the shirts were not nearly as colorful and the cars were not nearly as big, that merely landing in Texas amplified the world so much that it almost induced a headache.

  When we walked into his house, the living room was decked out in what seemed to be a testimony to American excess: two Christmas trees fully decorated, an almost life-sized Santa Claus figure standing beside the front door that bobbed up and down and rang a bell, the Three Tenors singing Christmas carols on a recording in the background. My stepmother had set out a platter brimming with French cheeses: Camembert and Brie and Bleu d’Auvergne, as if cheese were the only thing French people knew how to eat.

  “So you come from France?” she asked him. “Do you know Tony Parker?”<
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  Tony Parker was the French point guard for the San Antonio Spurs.

  He admitted that he did not.

  I could see my father standing in the corner of the room, watching Frédéric squirm. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He sauntered over and put his arm around my shoulder.

  “You do realize, Stephanie, that your ancestors were sent by the king of Spain to San Antonio to found the city, don’t you?” He shot Frédéric a look of distaste. “And do you know why he sent them? He sent them in order to defend Spanish territory from the French. And now, after all of these years, you invite one of them into our home?”

  For a moment I was not certain if he was kidding. Then he grabbed Frédéric by the arm and whisked him outside to a table beside the pool in the backyard.

  I could see the two of them through the clear panes of the glass door. My father was pouring him a beer. Frédéric had been dreading this meeting for weeks, worried that my father would think it strange that his future son-in-law had spent three years living in a monastery. But that didn’t worry me at all—contemplating the religious life was practically a rite of passage in my Catholic family, and my father had wanted to be a priest, as had most of his brothers, who had attended a Catholic seminary in high school. I was more worried about what my father would say when he realized that we were nearly penniless.

  Besides, my father never liked anyone who I brought home. Not the millionaire I had dated for years, who he thought was a snob. Not the brilliant scholar who spoke ten languages, who he thought was a bully. I was particularly haunted by the memory of a high school boyfriend whom my father had ordered out of the house until he removed his earring.

  But, through the window at least, the two of them appeared at ease with each other. For a while, they just drank their beer, my father seeming to study this curious creature who had dropped into his home, a strange combination of compassion and Alpine toughness. I was his third of four children, but the first to be engaged. He had not quite expected it to happen like this.