surprising us both as the wall supported me. Nine years to make up for, our shyness beaten out like yielding metal. Together we moulded our sharp edges into curves, and I ended up with sensational rashes from the rough concrete render, reminding me of when Loup and I first met and I had worried that my daughters would ask for an explanation for the carpet-burn on my knees and back. Of course, they already had that figured out.
The fresh rashes notch up the excitement: everything here in Auriol being a revelation. Lying spent, with the French windows open to the night air as it drifts down, moss-damp from the hills… the smells of a fish dinner across the lane… of marijuana puffs wafting up from the courtyard… the annoyance of the neighbours’ television and the clatter of their cutlery… the amusing climax-yelps of the woman down the street… the less amusing whine of the mopeds screaming down the narrow lane… and late into the night, the clamour of the village carnival, which just about drove us demented.
Mardi, Tuesday 16 June 2009.
“To sew is to pray” Louise Erdrich, ‘Four Souls.’ The river of remembering beckons, not to extinguish the bad memory, rather total immersion. A risk that it might well drown me. After all, there is little else to do today. The cauldron crackles… electricity shreds the sky, ropes of rain lash. Poked and jabbed, after three days, là terre caves in. Each of our I-gadgets, (a small but significant condolence), is out of battery. But I cannot start the generator and leave it in this torrent. Leaden dark at 4pm in early summer.
Crazy. Dingue.
Our tiny Ikea solar lamps struggle to give off sufficient light. I look for humour in how futile this weather renders my endeavours. The French country folk simply stay resolute in their gumboots, shrug and say: ‘Il pleut comme vaches qui pisses…. It’s raining like pissing cows.’
Our bedroom window smashes open with a wallop, and all my side of the bed is soaked. I begin to pen the memories, and the irony occurs to me that after six years, the first two sentences of my story remain exactly the same….
Feeling a bit flat today…Loup won’t be home until late…
I put my faith in the writing to re-make the story. But I want to check my memory against fact, so I search back to a 2009 calendar on my flailing phone, and see that indeed, it was a Tuesday….
….So that gives me time to get all this goddamn washing dry and iron all his shirts… and tee-shirts, and even his jeans…Jesus, who irons jeans and tee-shirts these days? Apparently the French do! And now I’m a wife of a Frenchman… after my first two cups of orange pekoe tea… a small triumph in a country of Nespresso converts… I’ve finally found good quality loose leaf tea and bought a little porcelain sieve which sits neatly inside my mug… I then scoff too many dark chocolate Petit écolier biscuits,but will compensate later by running up the hills to the chapel and beyond. Thank Christ for those hills and the forest and the chapel, otherwise I wouldn’t fit up the stairs…I must stop going to the boulangerie… the Auriol bakery is deservedly reputed as the best for miles around.
My mundane routine gives me structure; I turn on the radio, which I barely understand, but the music they play compensates. I hear the hometown twang of Angus and Julia Stone…apparently the darlings on the French scene at the moment. I bought A Book Like This with me, and Loup loves it too. We don’t have a CD player, so we listen to it whenever we’re out in the car. It’s not such a leap to imagine that Loup is Just a Boy, and that we are both Wasted, on the potion of our love. Impatient however to learn French songs, I shimmy around the table when I hear Christophe Mae, and coerce my mouth to mimic the unfamiliar sounds of Renaud’s ‘Mistrales Gagnant’.
The ironing takes over an hour. The constant rearranging of the table to accommodate the pop-up ironing board, which slips so that I have to start again, feels like an heroic feat. Fucking stupid useless board, we need a real one. Anyway, who does iron jeans these days? Nevertheless, I crease Loup’s shirts with precision, just the way he likes them. I then iron my collection of vintage silks and cottons, determined to make some progress with my sewing today. Waiting for my new husband to return home, the hours of each day have an insatiable need to be filled, like my appetite for French pastries. Sewing I decide, will fill those hours, become a ‘worthy’ occupation. So, I begin to re-create; hand-sew and embroider elaborate scarves and wraps out of vintage fabric.
Loup is incensed when he realizes that I spend more of my time and money sourcing old lace, retro prints, silk threads and bizarre buttons, than I do in selling my scarves. But it’s my money, I insist, and my time. This disagreement becomes a recurring theme…Loup cannot see the value in investing hours of effort and expense without an equivalent financial return. I can see his point, but flinch away from the familiar line of my father’s… yet another reminder of their powerful resemblance. Stunned each time I run into their wall of pragmatism, I finally see that their frustrating likeness is a thing to cherish. They were and are both, hard headed visionaries.
Having carefully hung Loup’s shirts from the centre of each spiral stair, I stand back and admire the cascade of grey, blue, and white. I am satisfied with my work, but relieved that I can retire the hot iron because the morning sun, although it cannot shine directly through our windows, makes a glaring presence. The underground kitchen is suddenly claustrophobic, but smells fresh-laundry-clean. Jeanine our neighbour said of the clean cotton scent one morning when she came with a gift of pot plants, ‘Ça sent bonne’.
As her words rolled together in my ear, I thought she was referring to Là Sainte Baume, the nearby old-growth forest where the nuns live below, and the priests live above. High up on a precarious perch built by the Catalans in the fifth century; where they guard a bone of Mary Magdalene’s in a gold cage, saying that she took refuge there in the concealed deep cave. Today, believers climb the massif to light candles and say a prayer for their lost loved ones. Or the ones they are about to lose. Water drips down the interior of the grotto, and it is always cold, no matter how hot the day is. I go there because it is a natural wonder. And because I feel less alone in the presence or the possibility of, a spiritual wonder.
My second Sunday in France, when Loup was occupied, I stepped straight out from our blue door, and map in hand, walked the least direct way, through rambling villages and groups playing là pétanque on the shaded roadsides, all the way up to Mary Magdalene’s bone. Thirty-four kilometres in thirty-four degrees. Arriving exhausted, épuisée, and elated; it felt like a true endeavour. In part, a true pilgrimage. A good-looking young monk sat perched on the stone precipice, 30 metres above the highest trees in the forest canopy. He swung his sandaled legs out into the air, in what seemed a brazen dare. Or else a confident certitude: his God cared for him. This monk was no ingénu; he spoke with experience in and of the world. He recounted his own pilgrimage, of leaving behind attachment, including his wallet. His face cracked up like any young man’s would, as he told the story of discovering a monastery water fountain that gushed wine into his water bottle instead of water.
I didn’t even think to look at Mary’s bone; distracted by this man’s path, his renunciation. I left distraught by the letters of grieving parents pleading to God to spare their children. I had no notion then that I might return soon to light my own candles.
Nearing midday now, cramped inside our Auriol kitchen, I am hot after the ironing. I cannot be bothered getting dressed, as I’m not going anywhere, and know no one who might come calling. So I stay in my airy silk slip, which verges on sexy, although I steer my mind away from that thought. Too much solitude contrives to make me anxious about Loup’s and my newfound lust. And to question the smorgasbord of sex that quickly satisfies Loup, but leaves me un-sated and abandoned. One day, I find something in his toolbox that serves to satisfy me. At last! Worried by this new indulgence, I later confide in Loup, and he confiscates the very thing that had gratified me. He then became more attentive and we dared to become more candid. And together, we feared less the uninhibited trysts of coupledom. For Loup, this new intimacy is a revelation, a rush. For myself, it is a long-awaited restoration.
Here now, in the stifle of this small plain