"I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map – All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps"
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient.
Ilona and the unknown women of the Compostelle replace my absent friends. As do my maps. Which by their very existence invite me into where they are not: to a blank space, where I might insert myself, or a labyrinth, where I might detect a way. Old fashioned-paper and ink beguiles, requiring attention and assiduous mending with sticky tape. Loved places are worried away by my repeated touch. In Loup’s absence, my map family transforms our mouldy interior with the promise of an exhilarating exterior. They are quite simply, my friends.
Our deal is: on selected weekends, Loup accepts the maps’ guidance, putting aside his hi-tech, and trusting me to lead him wherever my maps entice. But first we have to traverse the tentacles of the AutoRoute. Parading as the major arteries of France, in bold blue violet and red, I find them insensitive, an insult to France’s real contours. They are not her true veins, rather a brazen tattoo. As a walker, I have been ambushed by their loud bravado. As a driver I attempt to ignore them, because they take me too brashly to my destination. Hurtling along at 130k’s per hour, the Auto Routes represent a frenetic necessary evil. Loup is a user. His work demands it.
I once had the confidence to shoot along these arteries. Pascal, I have you to thank for that. That daring première, our sweeping dash to your hometown, not tainted by tawdry fear, but with something else, more puissant, more insistent and powerful. Then, on my first trip alone, carrying all our belongings from the sea to the dry prairie, I got stuck at a twenty-four-lane péage, my Mastercards rejected, and nearly got myself killed trying to find a live attendant who could help. But after that humiliation, I start using the Auto-route too. An addict of speed, armed with piles of coin, I cut my travelling time in half. As if participation in this grown up game facilitated a necessary initiation into French culture.
This time in France however, efficiency is not a priority. Neither is feeling cultured. On the contrary, it seems that killing time is what I do. To extinguish time the way you did, Pascal. I imagine a little of how you felt… to kill time… in these dog days… dehydration is slow and predictable.
‘Putain Frey, fucking shake yourself!’ yells Loup when he comes home and sees me recoiled on the floor in a corner, ‘Il faut que tu te secoues!!’
This scares me, and probably him too. He had not seen me like this since La Ciotat, when he was sick with guilt for his brother, and I was not me, but a useless broken thing: his scapegoat and seriously malade.
Now I am stronger. But how can I be a proper wife and helpmate for Loup, when there is this other lover, France, calling to me? I want to be a good wife. Whatever that is. But I want to go and explore. To reclaim the old confident outgoing me. I loathe this agoraphobia and self-pity. Isn’t exploration why I’m here? Isn’t adventure the reason Loup and I met? In the most improbable of places, in a town between a big wet bight, and a big dry plain. But now that Loup and I are married, je fait-semblant as a French femme waiting at home in a hut unbefitting the fairy-tale, waiting for my husband to return from work and rescue me on his white steed.
As if until that moment when I hear his van rumble up over the rocks, all I have is my imagination to validate me. As if all this stuff which happens without Loup, inside my head, this is not real. And then only after, when he opens the cyclone gate, drives in and then reverses back, flattening the rosemary and thyme… why do you have to do that Loup... park your bloody van right in the best spot, where we might sit and say merci dieu as the fireball sun slinks to purple behind the hills, our sacred shared moment I long for all day. Only then, does my concrete life begin.