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The undercover market is still open and I go mad over bread and cheese and wine and spring fruit. The raspberries are to die for. When I’ve unloaded it all in Fabienne’s kitchen, I look at the time. Too early to start on a bottle. And I feel a bit queasy after too much beer in the sun. Instead I open my laptop, planning to review the latest activity for Being Sleek – but my fingers wander to On the Luce.
I peruse the entries over the last week, trying to make some sense of them. Being immersed in the local language helps a little – I recognise a few words. Then I get Fabienne’s dictionary.
A fenêtre and a lune, fenestrating one true trou, oh grand air.
This feels poetic and wistful. A window and a moon making a hole in the air.
Pain in my heart. Pain at my door. Baguettes a la porte. Any port in this orage. O’rage against my cage.
‘Pain’ means ‘bread’ in French, which leads to baguettes. From porte meaning ‘door’ he moves to a port in a storm: orage. From orage he makes ‘rage’. But what’s his cage?
The more I read, the more the emotions behind the words get to me – not dread this time, but waves of sadness.
It’s almost dark and I’m exhausted. There’s some serious baggage emanating from these entries and I’m repelled, but also hooked. I turn on a lamp to dispel the unease, but what I need is some fresh air. As I walk the lanes of the artisan quarter, the lighted windows of my neighbours remind me of the fairy godmother’s grotto. Glowing private spaces that give me secret glimpses into the places that other people call ‘home’.
***
On Sunday Judy finally gets in touch.
“Sorry to call on the weekend but I’m trying to catch up. I’ve been nailed to my bed for eleven days.” She laughs a gallows laugh that ends in a cough. “That’s how the French put it – clouée au lit. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to death.”
She’s oblivious to Andrew’s Twitter attack.
“Another manoeuvre we can’t nail him for,” she says, sounding a little defeated. “He’ll be sure to have covered his tracks.”
“I keep worrying he’s going to turn up here.”
“I doubt it. He’s the kind of coward who won’t expose himself. But he’ll be digging for dirt. Something to use against you in court.”
“It’s a no-fault divorce.”
“Sure, but there’s the property settlement. He can try to manipulate that.”
Bloody hell. The troglodyte who won’t die. I’ve turned the tables on him more than once. How many times have I got to do it? And what will he do to me next?
“He’s let the house run down,” I say. “Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s hard to think like a troglodyte, but I’m doing my best.” She laughs with some of her old fire. “He could challenge a fifty-fifty split. Convince the court that you shouldn’t get half, that your financial position is better than his.”
“As if. On his salary and super.”
We leave it there, agreeing to keep in touch, and I return to the bloglo. Against my better judgement. The deeper meaning of the words eludes me and that’s part of the allure. But today’s post confronts me with a word I wish I hadn’t seen, and it’s too late to avert my eyes.
Une prison troglodytique, une vie monastique. O bored of the precipice. O bored of this ennui.
The word troglodytique almost makes me faint. I read on. The blogger is talking about troglodytes and caverns and grottos.
May I tomber to my tomb? Sans hésitation? Mais mon courage m’abandonne.
The clue is I am cloué to ma caverne, to ma grotte.
Diminué I am, émasculé I am not.
The word clouer – to nail – is the word Judy just used. Trying to take account of the plays on words, I come up with a translation:
A troglodytic prison, a monastic life. On the edge of the precipice. Bored with this ennui.
May I fall to my tomb? Without hesitation? But my courage abandons me.
The clue is I am nailed to my cave, to my grotto.
I am diminished, I am not emasculated.
The English lacks the poetry of the franglais, but as I read it again an image comes into mind, an image I’ll never forget. A replica from Michelangelo’s Prisoner series, on display in Sydney’s Central Station. I was crossing the concourse with my head down when an enormous lump of rock blocked my path. I looked up and saw above me a male figure trapped – half-sculptured and half-encased – in the stone. His predicament, his struggle to break free of his prison, was so palpable it moved me to tears. Tears for him, and for me, trapped as I was in my marriage.
The author of On the Luce is trapped in some way too. Desperation emanates from this poem and it speaks to me, because I’m still struggling to escape Andrew. And, on the flipside, I’m still struggling to discover where I belong.
***
The troglodyte returns in another dream. This time, I see more than his vast shadow flickering in the candlelight. It’s clear by the deliberate movements of his arm that he’s painting a wall, but no matter how I twist and turn I can’t see what he’s painting. By the morning I’m exhausted by the effort.
***
Judy steps up her pressure on Andrew and his lawyer, Reece Chapman. She sets a deadline for Andrew to get the house ready for market, or else an army of gardeners and cleaners and decorators will descend on Beach Road. Chapman is defiant, but Judy assures me that’s standard. It will happen in the end, because Andrew won’t want to relinquish control – or be humiliated in front of the neighbours.
I’ve befriended Juliet on social media, and although she rarely mentions Andrew – her independence is so refreshing – her photos provide occasional insights. In one he’s wedging a trap beside the fridge, because he swears he’s seen a mouse. Try in the fridge, Juliet writes. Like, under the mouldy food. Andrew – who used to shower twice a day and insist on a fresh towel every time – has stooped to this, all in the name of shafting me. What an inspiration I’ve turned out to be.
Keith and I keep in touch. He’s back at work with his war veterans, but his time with the elders has changed him.
“I keep going back to that cave and hearing the voices,” he tells me. His own troglodytic moment. “I’d love to be able to look in a mirror, see if my eyes are different.”
Like my eyes?
“What do you think you’d see?” I ask.
“A lighted window, into the heart of my experience. My eyes would look –” He casts around for the word.
“Replete?” I say. Where did that come from?
“Good word. Like Jung says, the cave...is now inside me.”
I’m trying not to think about caves when he asks, “Are you back from that beach yet?”
“Not my memory, no. It looks like it may never come back.”
“It will. You can’t keep a lid on something like that. If you don’t tease away at it gently, it’ll knock you over like a tsunami.”
“That’s not very original, Keith – not with a name like mine.”
“So stop avoiding it,” he says.
***
The troglodyte with the paintbrush gives me restless nights, painting a message I’m not getting. After Donkey Skin I’m wary of the school’s cultural experiences but I hear myself asking a teacher who speaks English, “There are lots of caves around here, aren’t there?” She nods. “Could we visit some?”
“Sure. You’re spoilt for choice in the Loire Valley, so name your troglo.”
She suggests an excursion to a château with another château buried underneath, and then a wine cellar in the tunnels where they harvested stone for the castles.
When the minibus heads off on Friday afternoon, I’m full of expectation that one of them will trigger an insight into my dream. But as I try to pick up vibes in the labyrinth of caves beneath the Château de Brézé I feel nothing but interest. And when we shuffle along the dark tunnels where champagne is aged, the automatic lights throw creepy shadows, but that’s all.
“You might be dreaming of another kind of cave,” Derek says when I share my disappointment.
“I’ve given up on caves, DD. I’m lucky I didn’t bump into any troglodytes.”
“But the caveman in your dream is painting something and France is full of prehistoric cave art. Remember Lascaux.”
Some of Fabienne’s sculptures remind me of cave art.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’ve forgotten the rule of three,” he adds.
Not the rule of seven, thank God. Otherwise I’d have to take out speleology insurance.
“Get a crystal and a map.”
“What?”
“You know,” Derek says. “Dangle the crystal over the map, when it starts vibrating you’ll know which cave you’re meant to visit.”
The odd ‘psychic twinge’ might hit me, but I leave Derek to don’t dabble in the downright ridiculous.
I thank him, and get back to cleaning the apartment and stocking the fridge. Fabienne is due back on Monday.
One of the language students gave me directions to the Asian supermarket and I take the bus there and fill my bag with ingredients for a stir-fry – the closest I can get to cooking Fabienne some Australian cuisine.
It’s when I’m taking the rubbish downstairs that I glance into her studio and decide to take a peek. It’s the biggest key on the key ring and I haven’t been inside – it’s felt too intrusive. Now I’m drawn to the enormous oak door and the cave-like space behind.
The tiny area is lit by a window from the alley. Shelves and floor are crammed with art materials and sculptures in various stages of completion, and there are canvasses stacked in a corner. But it’s the sculptures that attract me and I move around touching them, enjoying the textures of wood and metal and glass, the pleasing angles of line and shape, the humour she’s created as the materials collide.
One work-in-progress stops me – an enormous creation fashioned out of spoons. Dozens of spoons, exactly like Nigel’s spoon – antique and silver. She’s collected them one at a time by the look of the different designs – maybe from the brocante market. Several unused spoons lie in a box, waiting to join the others. I sit on the stool and gaze at the flowing lines of the sculpture. The spoons overlap in several threads that almost leap towards the ceiling, reminding me of seaweed. And there’s something about it... Not just the spoons. Something else.
Grabbing an unused spoon and a length of fine chain from another box, I lock the studio and return to the apartment. Fabienne’s got a laminated map of France on the kitchen wall. I lift it down and lay it on the floor. Then I tie the chain to the spoon handle. Derek said to use a crystal but I don’t have one – and a spoon was on my list of seven. Trying to remember what he said, I hold the chain very still, letting the spoon dangle over the map. It’s almost how I chose Hawaii after I won the green card, except then I used a blindfold and a pin.
I wait. Nothing happens.
“What’s supposed to happen?” I yell.
No answer.
The spoon hangs like a dead weight and I feel myself relax – what’s to fear from the divination qualities of spoons? I start at the top of the map and gradually move my hand horizontally from west to east, each sweep moving further south. As my hand passes the Dordogne region, the spoon starts to spin.
“Are you twirling it?” I say, like a sceptic at a séance.
No answer.
I move it away to the east, where it hangs still. When I move it back, it starts spinning again. Bloody hell.
I push my face into the map and read a place name: Vézère Valley. I peer closer and find dozens of red dots.
The Vézère Valley is a region full of caves and prehistoric art, Google tells me. The word ‘art’ sets my skin on fire. I need a map of the Vézère. Do spoons work over screens?
Within minutes, I’m advancing the map across the screen with my left hand, as the spoon in my right starts going crazy. I move it away and back again just to be sure, then I read out the name. Rouffignac.