“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
“A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he stood.”
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.
The path, down which Pascal leads, is desolate. Not a featureless path, but features that are alien and degenerative, distracting from the panorama. And I am possessed. Pascal is here, six years after that visit from the gendarmes, inside my head. Without doubt, inside Loup’s head. Colliding with the polystyrene walls of our hut. Often, I talk to Pascal.
Talk to him out of a selfish need to preserve him… To keep his memory alive…
Is this what people mean by that phrase?
I could also have talked to my father inside my head, but that would risk disappointment. On both sides.
With Pascal, I can be candid. And he is a mystery to unravel. And I have the time, so much time to do the unravelling. Later, back in Australia, I return my Dad’s gaze as he observes me from his framed post on my mother’s sewing table, and realize of course that he too was a mystery. A generous big life and a bigger heart than my own small one could recognize.
But for Christ sake, I am here living in Provençe en France! Cut the introspection… even at misery hut, life is to be lived in the present, right? Piss off Pascal! Piss off rain! So what if the rain won’t stop, let it rain! Hah, It’s been raining for centuries! Let the putrid poly and ply rot, because while they rot, the wild rosemary and thyme in our paddock will flourish. As will the deer in the forest behind our fence, and the nightingales who sing all night long.
But now there is a different onslaught of weather. Apart from Pascal, it is as if nothing else exists: just the weather and me. I remember back home we have a saying that it’s small talk to talk about the weather. On the contrary, it seems to me the weather makes us small. Right now, I can think of nothing more potent than the mistral to make us small. Menacing and mad-making, the wind we dread has arrived. We are no longer of any importance. I am no longer upright, but stagger like a tormented tree. I am shocked to find a wind here as vicious as at home on Discovery Bay: our chilling gale from Antarctica, which, if it doesn’t buckle and break you, imparts to you some kind of knowledge, some kind of hard-won communion.
On the other hand, the mistral, or master wind of Provençe, obliterates the rain and brings sunshine. An excess of sunshine. A 3,000 hours per year overdose of bloody sideways demented heat.
Another cup of tea will help. On edge, I decant water, which Loup has brought home in a discarded container from a building site; crumbs of couscous, the grainy tiling mix, still float there. I curse because there is just enough water to do the dishes, but not enough for a second cup of tea. After the deluge, the mercury hits record heights. We are told the inferno, fanned by the mistral, will get worse. Ironically, I now panic at the prospect of no water. Standing bent over our sink, a plastic tub that has never known a tap, a drain or a plug, I dry-retch as the baking odour of our partly composted merde flies through the slatted narrow opening, hitting me side on.
‘Don’t worry about that Frey,’ Loup had said a few weeks earlier, as we emptied our latrine, transferring our waste to a wide-mouthed trench and I scurried to hide it under leaves and branches and rubble. ‘It’s decomposed enough.’
‘Ne t’embete pas avec cela.’ Oh yeah? Try being here today darling, not that you ever are at the sink.
‘You’ve only got yourself to blame chérie…remember how you used to insist that I rest when I came home, that your job was the house keeping?’
I do remember, but that was when we lived in a très jolie stable with a blue door, taps, water, electricity and other helpful devices. During the deluge, as hikers disappeared and a whole village eroded, I had run outside with every possible container, desperate to capture the inundation.
‘See Loup, it’s crazy not to catch the rainwater! Why can’t we buy a tank and build a stand? WHY?’
But I knew why. Loup had no interest in making this hut our home.
As far as he was concerned, we had invested enough time into someone else’s dream. And besides, Loup got a thrill out of the three-litre a day challenge. That is, three litres per person per day of bought bottled water: for cooking, washing, bathing and drinking. Of course he could find ample water and coffee at work, so he had a head start. At the hut however, three litres didn’t stretch to the third cup of tea, the washing up or personal hygiene. Wet wipes become an obsession, followed by an allergic reaction. So finally, Loup has the idea to collect water from the taps at building sites.
‘Freya, you can’t drink the rainwater here, haven’t you heard of acid rain?’ I had to agree. The water I collected was grimy with gunk. But I had lived on rainwater for decades in Australia… that occasionally floated with dead possums. So now we drank tea floating with tiling couscous.
As the mistral bullies all that untapped rain away, it sweeps me with it into a cracked corner. Pascal sticks to me with the dross of dust and dirt and particles of things I wish I could ignore. The paradox being that Pascal has intervened, and somehow kept me from leaving. I might have been that Danish girl, lost in a blizzard in the Pyrenees.
‘You spend too much time inside your own head’, Loup warns. ‘Why don’t you go out Frey? Go to the market, go to the shops…but don’t buy, just look. Il faut changer tes idées.’
I am stuck, communing with a spirit, going mad. Loup is right, within an hour’s drive are some of Provence’s most celebrated cities, but I have lost the verve for city life. And lost the confidence to drive her fast arteries. It is only France’s nature that interests me. Too late I realize, imprisons me.
GO Freya, aller aller, run to the hills, and don’t look back!
Return to those bewitching peaks whose trails I pore over on my maps, deep into the night, too engrossed to rescue the moths as they expire in the candle-wax. Tonight as a beetle dives headlong into my wine, I watch, mesmerised by its frantic laps around my glass until with deliberation, I rescue it. The soggy bug drags its tail along the table for a few minutes; flaps dry its waterlogged wings, and then takes off again. Does it know how close to death it had come? I question my callousness.
I would be that helpless insect on France’s distant peaks. Having never held an ice pick in my hand, let alone jammed anchors into rock or attached my life to the end of a rope. And vertigo is my enemy. I dare not go there alone, but the layered skirts of forests and brooks and cascades and perilous rocks I desire. Under their secretive canopy, I sense a familiar longing.
To be that Danish girl.
Meanwhile I sniff our conjugal waste. Wallow in it, this lone witness to our marriage. I cannot decide if I am ashamed or indignant, that our shit should smell so foul. I think of the blasé liberty of dog pooh plastered along French pavements, floating down drains into canals. Bobbing down canals into the sea. The magical Mediterranean, riddled with e-coli. Closed to bathers after rain. And the shock of human faeces on proud display beside the distant swimming cove, Le Mugel; and once, when I mistook a pristine pebble riverside for paradise, only to find a fresh pile of pooh and toilet paper plonked right there in the middle. It seems ironic that unmitigated merde does not offend the French, the purveyors of chic. And I wonder could I learn something from them.
Am I the hypocrite?
When we lived with power and appliances, I bought the audio book of Les Miserables, and it kept me company during winter nights awaiting Loup. This solitary listening became a mystic ritual, as I never grasped all the words. And I did not grasp then what Jean Valjean and Loup and I now share in common. Victor Hugo raised the sewer to view, inverting Paris as ‘the City of light’ into something much more interesting: ‘Paris has another Paris under herself…. which is slime, minus the human form.’ Paris is a long way from our hut, and I cannot make the lofty claim that our merde is my greater conscience, but it is my obsession. It’s a daily preoccupation to find enough vegetal matter to cover our waste. I dream a recurring dream: a nightmare of swimming through a sea of faeces, knowing that my daughters are in that same putrid sea; my frantic arms push past lumps of turds trailing my own waste, I clamp my lips tight against the repugnant wet, but I cannot find my girls. I cannot save them.
When I am awake, it is almost a relief to have to face it. I like that Loup and I can’t just flush it away or hide it. But I regret that we don’t get savvy; and do what Aurélien our quirky neighbour does, fertilizing his plants with it, making his dope grow stronger. Not that Loup would ever want that. As with water tanks or solar panels, Loup has little enthusiasm for elaborating his last stand. We are too far down. So digging deeper is what we do. Eking out the lime to last, scrounging for pine needles and twigs of aromatic anything, is my job. And when Loup lifts his head up from his tangle of legal letters one 41-degree Sunday, his face contorted,
‘Chérie, what’s that putain smell?’ it is my job to go in search of new lime. Loup had tried unsuccessfully to find a fresh source, as the garden and building supplier had stopped selling it. In fact finding lime in France was now like trying to buy a gun: illegal to sell or buy it without a licence.
‘It’s to burn and bury my wife, the ball-breaker, là casse couilles’ Loup would joke with the good-humoured nursery owner, whenever she needed to note his request. Lucky for him she took a liking to him. I was less caustique, not daring to use the same humour when I tried in vain at my third Jardinière, who asks sternly,
‘Do you know this product Madame? What is it you are using it for?’
I could hardly reply, ‘To torture my trou du cul, arsehole husband!’
Reminded of Aurélien, I wonder where he has got to… I haven’t seen him since that dank morning in early spring, when he made me laugh by his bug-eyed incredulity: ‘you mean you don’t have any heat or light?’ Before we had our potbelly, and the midday temperature was all of 3 degrees. But neither do I seek him out, uncertain of the path of friendship in this new land; disappointed that our roads lead in different directions. Loup and I think he has a new lady; we’ve seen different cars there, seen a woman unloading kids and bikes and heard music all night. I am happy for Aurélien. But shocked by the shrinkage of my own life; how can I spend so much time speculating on the habits of my neighbour?
‘Has he gone climbing today? He’s not home yet... I hope he is safe. His generator is on... he must be welding.’
‘Look, did you see that girl?’ asks Loup, ‘she seems a bit young’.
‘Nah, she’s not the one he likes…he told me ages ago, he met up with a mate’s ex on Facebook…’
‘You mean the one with the kids? Poor guy, another cougar victim!’ Loup jibes.
‘Tais-toi…. he told me he’s always wanted kids.’
‘His blinds are still closed, but his van is still there…must be sleeping off another all-nighter,’ says the conscientious Loup, convinced that Aurélien’s autonomy and rave parties means he’s doing something shady. And has with cunning circumnavigated the system. I envy Aurélien that he has escaped the leviathan, which Loup cannot.
We are guilty of being busybodies, according to Loup, France’s second sport after striking, like the town criers on benches at the entrance to each village; or the women who hang out of the top-storey windows as I once did in Auriol, watching and waiting. Inventing a salacious story to ease the drudgery.
Of course Loup and I discovered later that we, and I in particular as a female alone, were ourselves under surveillance, and the subject of our various neighbours’ speculations. Who as it turned out, were mostly male. This was apparently no place for a woman. Unlike our neighbours, sequestered behind their high hedges or stonewalls, we sat exposed at the dead-end of the track behind a cyclone fence: an easy target. We were after all wedged in-between a hunting reserve and an Army rifle range. Months later in the hunting season, trigger-happy chasseurs came too close, and I was a sitting duck as I peed outside on the thyme.
I can no longer tolerate the merde on the breath of the mistral. Annoyed by my incompréhension of an intellectual radio discussion on France Inter, irritated by Aurélien living a vivid life in this hellhole, desperate for Loup to return so we can walk to the high crag I discovered, above all pissed off with myself and Pascal, I flit half-heartedly through the one English book that I have in a French translation. I bought it thinking that Loup might listen to me practice reading aloud, and because I want to be its author. But Loup falls asleep. Which astounds me, given the horror of ‘The Road’. As with listening to the French radio, my reading in a foreign tongue is surreal, and inexact. But there is an advantage to being one step removed from the literal. Everything takes on more intensity.
More poetry, more beauty, more terror.
In ‘La Route’, the words’ alien appearance and sound alone evokes fright, and I am relieved that it doesn’t continue to be our nightly read. Cormac McCarthy’s text translated into French seems even more ominous; it’s etymology more eerie. But Loup has heard enough to say, ‘we are the lucky ones. There’s always somebody further down the food chain.’ In the murky lure of the events along ‘The Road’, this seems a careless cliché. When I turn on the news, and France Inter reports of a heinous act, a decapitation farther up the road, it is the tremor in the journalist’s voice that alarms. This has happened, this is happening here, right now. This is not a fictional road. Our hut might be the best place to hunker down. An ill wind, more ill than the mistral, is blowing across France, unsettling her very foundations. Out loud as if to Pascal, I reread several times the closing lines of ‘La Route’ and attach myself to its thread of hope.
‘…. Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains…on their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.’