“If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”
Gilles Deleuze.
Our Sunday road trip has given me confidence. I will drive again: take the knowledge in my fingertips absorbed from the maps. I make a start with my walking expeditions along the canal. Skirmishing between the traffic and the detritus of the industrial estate, to the boulangerie, the épicerieor the pharmacie. Or to visit Éloise, the vivacious teacher who stopped beside me in her black Mercedes convertible, and asked me if I’d like a lift, as I struggled home with the shopping one broiling afternoon. I gladly accepted, but asked her to drop me off whilst we were still on the bitumen, still in normal-land. Her coupé would not have liked the potholes and dirt. And Loup would have not liked that I brought someone home. Éloise lives on the right side of the canal, where houses are lavish and have swimming pools, and she asks me if I’d like to tutor her children in English. I jump at the opportunity, and hope to cultivate a friendship. But Éloise can’t stick to a plan… she forgets that we have set a time, and then rings and requests out of the blue if I could come right now, ‘Please, right now, toute de suite.’
The magnitude of hurt I feel at being cancelled or forgotten is ridiculous. I envy Éloise for being busy with her children. For being productive and aspiring and so goddamned cultured. Guilty that my kids were never ferried between horse riding and choir and ballet and I am being a bitch, une salope, because Éloise is lovely towards me; she just forgets to treat my time as important, or to pay me. And although I do not want to trade places, I envy her for being the other.
Loup is angry when he finds out that I have spoken about him, uncovering his so-called anonymity, and is further insulted when Éloise latches onto what he considers the most diminutive of his skills: a tile-layer. We are both amused that she regards our predicament as quaint; her word: ‘originale’. It gives Loup some satisfaction to have her imagine our life far from its reality. And that she would never be able to locate us.
This stinking afternoon, I’ve been cancelled in favour of swimming. Regardless, I force myself to leave the hut. Thinking of the snails that I once kept as pets, feeding them tender rose petals, carefully placing them back in their jar each night, until I came to school one morning to find that my teacher had tossed out their miniature garden and stomped all over my snail family. Now as I lope along the track I find myself weeping, nonsensically. With angst for being cancelled, for being without friends or purpose, and in sorrow for my snail family when I was five.
In their honour, I absorb each contour into my sluggish foot. Suspecting that like them, torpor and irrelevance will get me killed, I avoid the rapid trajectory. And regret the loss of this speed-savvy: its demise signalling my lack of savoir-faire. One doesn’t require the major arteries for the Laundromat and two supermarkets. The minor veins will do. Time has no measure. Apart from Loup’s leaving and returning. I now relate more to the elderly lady at the Laundromat; she with just one good arm, with whom I chat, as she assiduously folds her washing from the dryer. I offer to carry her laundry basket to her car. This gentle encounter makes me regret the distance from my former octogenarian friends. And the one I adored, who has gone.
Madame Bergère, who rescued me from venturing too far down your path Pascal, during the in-between years, as we grappled with the truth that you were not coming back. Each January, if I were back in Melbourne, I would ring Irène on her birthday, as it coincided with the Australian Open, and we would feign swooning over Roger. I figured that Irène was a real catch when she was young and unlike me, a fine tennis-player.
Irène’s life partner, whom she never married nor lived with, (the zest of their long romance?) was from a family of White Russians who had escaped to France with talented credentials, but bolshie ideals. Sacha would tease the conservative Irène with exaggerated communism; his pale blue eyes alight with playful derision. I remember a photo of their younger selves, in the mountains: he a bronze Adonis, and she a petite, charmante coquette. Their chemistry barely contained by the frame. Sacha and Irène became our only friends, although we did not see them often. But when we did, each occasion was flavoured with their irrepressible joie de vie. One of my most memorable dinners was when they invited their best friends, Rosa and Henri, and the inspiring widow, Agostina, who were all close to ninety, and we all sat outside under Irène’s plane tree, candles alight, herbes de Provençe decorated the table; lots of frommage de chevre, pizza, salad, Irène’s special garlic dressing, washed down with Marsanne de Cassis, Rosa’s hand-made chocolate and Tina’s excellent smoked almonds. There I was privy to a level of modest, witty, and heartfelt conversation such that I had never experienced in France. These were indeed old souls with quivering fists.
Two years ago, before I returned for a visit to Australia, I hugged Irène farewell. Unexpectedly she had said,
‘Je vous invitez chez moi, en Corse. These aren’t just empty words, Freya…. I’d like you to spend September with me there, at our house. You’ll be smitten by Corsica! You and Loup should both come.’
Irène had paused and added, ‘It might be my last time there.’
Sacha cautioned, ‘you won’t ever want to leave, Frey… once you’ve seen La Corse, you’ve seen the world’.
Now, a year and a half later, I am longing to visit my old friend. It‘s an excursion that will take an entire day: I plan my route with some apprehension. Nervously, I devour the maps, and choose the lesser roads, right from the sortie of our hideaway, to the entrée of the old Mediterranean port of La Ciotat. Three hours of my private Tour de France. Pascal, you can stay behind. Please, go back to your clouds. Laze with a lizard on a rock, or run with the wolves. Courir avec Loup. But leave me alone so I can enjoy my drive with my new Michelin map, and my music. I don’t need you beside me.
There is nothing ugly along the way, unless you consider the 300-metre-tall chimney of the coal-powered electricity station at Gardanne, to be ugly. From a distance, its spire is an arresting counterpoint to the landscape. Splicing the sky, it takes your eye straight up to the chalk-white massif of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which hovers above, the mirage of a colossal ship, released from its earthly moorings. Everything below, man-made or otherwise, diminishes as if underwater. Even the power station.
My minor itinerary is thrilling. The adventure begins as soon as my tiny voiture crawls out of our cul de sac, crosses the canal and encounters bitumen for half a kilometre, turning before the industrial estate, to re-enter the dirt, again cross the canal, winding past the new Mas, turning left at the imposing chateau and olive groves of Éloise, and traversing a vineyard on what is no wider than a donkey trail. I can hear the thrumming on the main road, but stick to the dirt. The hot air now smells of tilled earth and horse manure, not our own merde. I pass two donkeys who come to my window; I stop and say Bonjour and Merci. Bon après-midi, to the rollicking goats.
Soon I find myself under the vertiginous arched bridge of the Aqueduc de Roquefavour, spanning a chasm between cliffs of lichen and moss. Then it’s a scramble of webbed detours to avoid the Auto-Routes and the round-about where the infamous putes and prostitutes loiter, and then with relief, climbing aside the forest of Mimet, dropping down to Peypin, and then sighting the lonely landmark of Auriol, La Chapelle de Sainte-Croix. Where, as a new wife in this new land I used to climb; huddled against its centuries-old worn stone, I would observe my new hometown below, as she slowly shed her winter cloak of strangeness.
Beyond Auriol my journey takes me higher into nostalgic territory. Landscape that I once learned by heart, treading miles of trails until I belonged to my first French home. And she belonged to me. Bypassing the commerce of Aubagne, dwarfed by the bulbous bluff of La Sainte Baume, my tiny car ascends the sinuous circuit de Castellet, adrenalin rising to meet the kamikaze of crazy motorcycles and sickening S-bends. An unexpected present in my belle-soeur’s letterbox from my daughter, The National ‘High Violet’ is blaring out on the car CD player, and the mistral cannot catch me.
‘It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders…It’s a terrible love and I’m walking in…’
Singing aloud, victorious. My phobia of spiders cured by the hut. Like the knowledge imparted by the gales at Discovery Bay, I imagine I am somehow improved by the mistral, by the smell of our merde, by the ugly hut, by the spiders. By solitude. By necessity.
Passing through the picture-perfect Gémenos, higher up through the forest and limestone paths of pilgrims down to the charmed Ceyreste, the ball of sun bouncing off the Mediterranean below. Silver glazes the windscreen.
Overpowering the sea is a dinosaur’s hump, Le Mugel, against whose rock and shadows, loom the iconic monoliths of La Ciotat. These are the remnant towering cranes of the shipbuilding port; Jurassic insects laying claim to their entitlement. This is still their town. The Autoroute journey would have lasted exactly half this time. But so would have the intrigue. There would have been no grace for alteration, no grafting into me from the journey.
My friend Irène lives in the older quarter of là vieux ville, the high stonewalls and bougainvillea protecting its charm from gangs of mopeds and all-night beach discos. I buzz at the elaborate gates, as I have so many times before, but this time Irma’s shutters are closed, and I can’t see her potted geraniums, or the gerberas that I’d given her, or her colourful paper lanterns hanging from the giant plane tree. The house and courtyard hunker, bereft. Neither Irène’s landline nor mobile are working.
I push aside a feeling of dread, telling myself that Irène and Sacha have probably gone to Corsica early this year. But then the gates slowly swing open, as the neighbour arrives in her Peugeot cabriolet, sunroof open. She lives in the huge house across the courtyard, happens to share the same surname as Irène, but as Loup observes, little else.
‘Excusez-moi Madame, I’m looking for Irène’, I say in a small voice, suddenly uncertain.
‘Ah, you don’t know? Irène has left us. Il y’avait deux semaines. Since two weeks.’
I knew that when the French say ‘Elle nous a quittés’- it’s like our way of saying - she has departed, passed on. So the truth was, Irène had gone much further than Corsica. The neighbour went on to explain that Irène had parted ‘brutalement’. She watches as the word stuns me.
The picture of Irène dying a brutal death is unbearable. But I discover that the French adverb here meant ‘sudden and quick’. Not violent for Irène herself, only for those around her. For Sacha. Slumped back in my car, unable to stop the tears, I berate myself: why hadn’t I come two week earlier? Pissed off for being a coward with the roads, I take the very long way home that night. And wondered why the shock of losing Irène was so profound…? Should I feel guilty that I had formed such a quick and deep attachment for a woman who was practically a stranger? Had I neglected my own mother, whom I was always deserting for another country? I can only trust that Irène knew I adored her. And that my own mother knows that without her insight, her example, her modest constant light, my bobbing dinghy-life would have floundered long ago. Arriving back at the hut very late, and waking up Loup to tell him, it feels as if everything we touch turns sour. Not just our milk that turns yellow and lumpy without a fridge and every second day must be thrown out. Every single thing we touch, se degrader.
Loup doesn’t easily express emotion, but I know that he and Irène shared a rare closeness; flirting because they could, playing with imagined ‘what if's’. And it is only thanks to Loup, that I gained Irene’s friendship. We are silenced; we do not know how to comfort each other. My devastation is deeper than I can fathom. But then, so is everything else about this place.
It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders…
Loup is submerged under his correspondence, his calculations, and another grieving. He is hounded by threats from the tax department, from sub-contractors, from suppliers, from debt-collectors; dealing with clients who won’t pay, tenants who won’t pay, and above all, a dishonest and corrupt construction milieu with, as he says, their hands and balls tied by the mafia. Night after night, weekend after weekend, Loup recounts his tedious battles, yells and screams on the phone, sweating conscientiously to honour his dues. It is only after exhausting every avenue to redeem his company and his staff that he surrenders himself to legal administration for all of the above.
In the glower of his crisis, my loneliness is a petty indulgence. Loup buries himself further into his registered letters, pleading clemency to a system that knows not his name nor his cause, and I bury myself further into my maps. I help by listening. I listen to Loup and dig and scurry and bury. I chide Pascal.
Pascal, did you take the byways? I never really knew that much about you. But you did have an old 4-wheel-drive, and we did once visit a tic-infested ruin in a humid valley in Les Vosges, where you had abandoned an old bulldozer, embedded in mud. We got the picture that perhaps you too had a passion for lost corners. In your hoard of stuff, we found a bundle of maps. Unbeknown to Loup, I have kept them all, savouring in secret the random places you had circled in fading red or green ink. Or, were these the clandestine destinations of your mysterious father; his far-flung boltholes? I try to thread your journeys together. But Loup tells me that you never ventured much farther than your native Alsace. Not until that one Christmas when we trespassed together in the blue Yarra ranges, and later you went on your own outback adventure, the tales of which we can only invent.
Fucksake leave me be Pascal! Irritated now by the constant wondering. As if that’s going to bring vivid life back. Or make the hut more agreeable. Or lessen the burden on Loup. I boil water and tidy and re-tidy our boxes, sweep the ants and crush the cockroaches. Slam the shutters shut against the mistral and the heat. But I am defeated. It is 39 degrees inside, and 43 out.
Like a limpet I attach myself to France Inter and wait for each day to end. For the ritual rumble of Loup’s tyres upon the stones as they deafen the radio; luring me out to the crépuscule twilight, to once again sit on our stack of timber palettes, drink cheap Côte de Rhone rosé and inhale the lilac mirage of Les Alpilles.