my own Whitehorse: the ice and river-bound birthplace of my daughters. I want to share that place one day with Loup. But he has his own trove of mysterious places. Perhaps it is each other’s strangeness that attracts? Our separate pasts, uncertain and étrange. A paradox: our love described by my friend Agnés as ‘un coup de foudre’. A bolt of lightning.
Today at the hut the storm has given way to floods. The news on France Inter reports storm casualties: several injured in the Alps, four hikers dead after a mudslide on the GR 20, an arduous long-distance trail in Corsica. And there are grave fears for a Danish woman who went missing whilst walking the Path to Santiago, the Chemin de Compostelle in the Pyrénées. I thank Christ I didn’t take off last week. Desperate to leave, to return to the Path… there must be an angel who knows my weakness. Pascal? (Yes, I believe you know my weakness for paths that lead me away from this hut, from the grim misère we have made for ourselves. You should know; you are part of it).
The first time I embarked upon the Compostelle I did not think of myself as a pilgrim. But I returned changed by my encounters with genuine pilgrims. In particular, the older women: women who were accustomed to staying at home knitting for their grandchildren, who nevertheless tackled the long path alone, every year, two weeks or two months at a time. They would confess to me,
‘My husband has given me his blessing, and each year I return to walk another stage. It is something that I want to accomplish on my own….’They invariably ended with an apology for not being athletic, for not belonging to an elite hierarchy of hikers,
‘…même si je ne suis pas une grande marcheuse.’
Those women fill me with hope. I plead for the safety of the lone Danish girl. I crave to be out there, hiking the Path with those women; but instead I return to my mundane pilgrimage. To that journée, almost six years to the day, when I was alone in Auriol, engrossed in my embroidery.
8 Rue du Sarret, Auriol 2009.
“Sweet hours have perished here, This is a timid room – Within it’s precincts hopes have played Now fallow in the tomb.” Emily Dickinson
My first address as a new wife in France: it is early June, six summers ago. I think it was a Tuesday.
Mardi: normally an ordinary day, when Loup arrives home more or less on time; not like a Monday or a Friday, when he is held back. And perhaps it seems like a Tuesday because I felt flat. Monday was a day I enjoyed, after spending the weekend with Loup, either helping him on a job, or if he were free we would head off camping somewhere, losing ourselves in the mountains. So that by Monday, there was always a few loads of washing to do, camping gear to clean, sleeping bags to air, and then the time-consuming task of cramming all our equipment back into secluded corners of our tiny home.
When, after our long separation, I first visited Loup here, I was charmed by the petite maison with its cerulean door and shutters opening directly onto the street. It was dwarfed by the other houses around it, crammed between two towering walls; an afterthought. It felt as if I might soon be joining the ranks of ‘The Borrowers’, living off the crumbs that fell from the giant homes all around. When Loup explains that his rented lodging used to be a stable, its tacked-on appearance makes sense. Now, a year later, I see the wonder and absurdity of it all. I have traversed the world; left behind my daughters, my ageing parents, my job, my husky, my friends, my wild Cape, to live in a one-stall stable. My own house is no bigger than a two-stall stable, but when I step outside, the Southern Ocean pounds beneath. Snakes slither from the bushes, ambush me under terracotta pots, and wait in silence in the high grass along the cliff’s edge. Returning from long walks late, I am ambushed again. This time by old buck kangaroo grazing at my wobbly gate, his testicles absurd as they drag across the ground, his brawny neck and shoulders withering; unhinged, outcast, alone.
Gentrification is a waste of time chez moi; where I come from.
Here however, at Loup’s rented stable, when I step outside I am on the road. Everything is béton: concrete and bitumen. Unless you tilt back your head, to find impressionist light suspended between roof tiles; bold and bright between the black cross-stitch of a multitude of wires. As soon as you re-enter the blue front door, (the only door, there is no back door), you take three steps down into the kitchen: the engine room. It houses the toilet, washing machine, combined bookshelf and pantry, with a spiral staircase wedged into the corner. The area is about two metres wide, and four long. I fall for that staircase; the timber is worn under the weight of many feet, the patina of the handrail gleaming under the press of many hands.
Soon, I will fall in an unexpected way. The stairs down to the toilet and back up to our bed becoming an obstacle I cannot master. The two-metre distance from anywhere to anywhere, even on the flat, insurmountable. But my legs were not broken. Confounded, Loup and his sister will one-day carry me off to get fixed. But my legs are not broken, I will protest from the back seat. Struggling to speak. So I repeat the same useless phrase, there is nothing wrong with my legs.
But this comes after.
Here, at 8 Rue de Sarret, Loup has everything arranged in precise order. There is no place for decoration or mess. The two exceptions are the small Aboriginal dot paintings with which I dared to entice Loup back. Posted two years earlier, a goanna and a yabby… I had remembered Loup’s minimalist palette… charcoal, anthracite and white…. and his intrigue with the art form: symbols of innocence concealing sadness. Once I had by providence found myself in the artists’ land; seen their hope, their renaissance. I could not think of better emissaries with which to entrust my own audacious hope. So when I see the yabby and goanna presiding over Loup’s miniature domain, I know I have found my new home.
One simple white Ikea table occupies the space under one window. A drab window, as it looks out onto the three adjoining walls of the neighbouring three-storey houses, and the cell-like courtyard where all their effluent pipes end up. And where the neighbour with the dog, takes it to squat, leaving its pooh lying around to steam and get crusty. Our senses are abruptly disturbed in the mornings by the noise and odours of the neighbours going about their daily ablutions. On hot days, the rising stench is nauseating.
Either side of the white table sit two small wooden folding chairs. My cooking bench consists of a gas camping stove and microwave. Loup loves his kitchen, because he can reach everything without having to get up from the table. The fridge, the coffee-machine, the sink, the stove, the washing machine, the pantry and the gas-burner… they are all within an easy arm’s length. Above the oven is our other window, which opens directly onto the street. So we do not in fact, open it. Standing there whilst cooking, I am a voyeur, too close to the legs of passers-by. Amused and astonished by the theatrics of neighbours reversing, stalling, revving and cursing to secure a car park. Parking in the centre-ville is all about the ruse.
Until Loup and I hear on the radio of a man who was so incensed by a young couple having parked in his spot, that he charged upstairs and shot them. Their innocent mistake now a tragedy. The ruse turned monstrueux: they had left their car for a careless moment in the neighbour’s territory, so they could show off their brand new baby to friends.
Neither of our downstairs windows lets in any sunlight, so I prefer to do my sewing on the floor upstairs. Here at least we have one generous window, which looks down the street and across to the terraced garden of our elderly neighbours, Jeanine and Léo. When I first arrived at my new Auriol home, Loup had slept on the floor on his narrow hiking mattress, giving me his single bed. ‘It’s fine Freya,’ he said. ‘It’s summer, so don’t worry.’ Negotiating my nesting, not wishing to cause alarm in my husband’s solitary den, I nevertheless bid for a shared mattress. We inadvertently created a spectacle for the neighbours, having a hell of a time hauling the leaden thing up off the street through the French windows; there was no way it could fit through the front door and up the narrow spiral staircase.
Like children discovering that their parent’s bed is a trampoline, we took advantage of our new mattress filling the entire room. It meant we could discover new gymnastic ways of lovemaking.