Seven
On the following Monday, having bid farewell to my old friend, who was having such a good time that he vowed to rejoin me, I set out once more on my northern pilgrimage, following the same road I had taken out of St.-Jean-de-Luz the week before. The weather had improved, it was now warm and humid, and the back roads smelled of rich pine woods and sea air, and once more there was no wind, so the riding was easy. There was no traffic to speak of either, and I began weaving to and fro across the flat road, singing and pedaling, pedaling and singing, and thinking of Bordeaux and wine and food and half wishing old Griggsy would be there when I arrived to find good restaurants and take care of the wine orders. I did know a similar type in Bordeaux, an expatriate Englishman, but he was a poverty-stricken aspiring writer, and there would be no high living as long as I was around him. He had offered me a bed though.
Near Cap Breton I stopped in a field of clover, hid my bicycle, and walked away from the road with my usual lunch of bread, onion, sardines, and tomatoes, and found a little grove beyond the field. Butterflies were rising and settling in the clover, the hot smell of earth rose around me, and I settled down to eat and drink. No rush, no responsibilities, nowhere to go, and nothing to do but ride and eat and eat and ride. The open road, as Griggsy might say. Freedom.
After lunch I fell asleep, and when I woke up, a little old man in a beret and blue coveralls was staring at me, leaning on a cane.
“You are not of here, Monsieur?” he said in formal French.
“No, I am passing through on my way to Bordeaux actually.”
“Bordeaux,” he said disparagingly, indicating that Bordeaux was not a good place to go.
“In fact, I’m headed for Scotland,” I added.
“Scotland!” he shouted. “Why on earth would anyone want to go to Scotland. Do they have food there?”
I presumed that since the people of Scotland had been successfully breeding for more than ten centuries, they must also be feeding. I said as much, politely, in so many words, and he shook his head incredulously.
“Scotland is a long way from here. Are you on the right road?”
I was not by any means on the right road for Scotland. But I explained that I actually preferred France, so I wanted to take my time getting to Scotland. This satisfied him and he made to leave. Then he asked me if I had been in the war.
“Never,” I said. I’m not sure what war he meant, though.
“Eh, bien,” he said, and saluted me and made to leave once more. Then he came back.
“This bicycle in the bushes. It is yours?”
I said it was.
He looked back at the place where my bike was hidden.
“I had a bicycle like that once,” he said, sadly. “But times change.”
“This is true,” I said.
“It was a good bicycle.”
“So is this one; I’ve ridden a long way on this bicycle. All through southern Spain.”
He didn’t respond to this. I believe he was reliving better times on his old Peugeot. He snapped his head to the side and clucked. I was waiting for a good story. How he arranged to meet his lover by moonlight by the canal I had passed and had ridden through the pines under the brindled moonshadows of the branches, but had a flat and couldn’t make it and had walked the rest of the way, arriving at dawn to find her asleep in the woods. They had consummated their love as the sun rose above the clover fields to the east.
I waited.
Perhaps he was in the underground—he was about the right age. Perhaps he was selected by his village to carry an important message to de Gaulle’s forces who had landed nearby, blackfaced at Hossegor. He rode through the pines at midnight, slipping past the Vichy guards. Some became suspicious and gave chase, but he pulled off and hid in the shrubbery until they passed, then resumed his mission.
I waited.
“Was a good bicycle, mine,” he said.
“How so?”
“Just good.”
Silence.
“Every day I ride to the bakery and get the bread.”
“Hmm.”
“Now I am too old to ride.”
“Were there any Nazis down here?” I asked. It was a dangerous question; he could have been a Vichy collaborator for all I knew.
“No. No Nazis, not here.”
He stared in the direction of the bicycle.
I offered him some cheese and a sip of wine, but he said he must be off. So I collected my things and walked back across the pasture with him to the bicycle, hoping he would begin talking. But he only stared down at me as I packed everything up.
“Where are you headed, though?” he asked.
“Scotland.”
“Ah, oui, Scotland. That cold country.”
Leaning on his cane, he watched me ride off. I hate missing stories, I’m sure he had one, but I had to get to Scotland.
For the next two or three days I rode on along the coast, passed Vieux-Boucau and on to St.-Julien-en-Born, where I spent the night. This was a flat country of endless pines, with occasional lumbering operations and sections of forest where the locals were tapping the trees for turpentine. Little sulphur butterflies, pearl crescents, and coppers were fluttering at the roadside, and there were periodic clearings where I could rest in the sun, sedated by the hot smell of pine. There was still no traffic at all and I resumed entertaining myself by weaving to and fro on the empty road and singing loudly. Once, thinking myself alone, riding on in this manner, no-handed, declaiming and shouting and weaving, I glanced over into the woods and saw a group of timber cutters resting on the ground, smoking, white handkerchiefs tied on their heads like bathing caps. They stared at me incredulously.
I grabbed the bars and rode on, subdued.
At St.-Julien-en-Born I found a small pension with a tiny courtyard and a private entrance to my room. The night was warm and sultry, there was a crescent moon between the tree limbs, the crickets were singing, and a periodic breath of wind rolled into the little room carrying the odor of the night fields and raising the lace curtains sensuously. I fell asleep to the sounds of the countryside and dreamt I was home on a little porch bedroom where I used to sleep in the summers at my family’s place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Around twelve or one in the morning I was awakened by a beautiful warbling song just outside my window. The song consisted of a series of sultry trills and eerie, fluted whistles that bubbled along, built to a crescendo, halted briefly, and then started all over again. It was a song I had read about all my life, but had never actually heard—the long sad complaint of the fabled nightingale. This bird would sing softly for a while, then stop, then start again, and as I listened a phrase came to me: “Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.…” I lay awake trying to remember who wrote the lines. I attempted to summon up Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” but all I could come up with was “already with thee, tender is the night” and “O for a beaker full of the warm south,” and something about light-winged dryads of the trees. Quandaries of this sort can keep one up all night if you let them and I was soon swept into a wakeful review of world literature involving nightingales, beginning with the sad story of Procne and Philomela, two beautiful sisters who ended up as birds, Procne as a swallow and Philomela as the nightingale.
I thought of Juliet and Romeo arguing over the birdsongs at the end of their fateful night together, the harmonious madness of Shelley’s skylark, Keats’s drowsy owls and nightingale, swan song’s, and gull mew, and Anglo-Saxon gannet cries, and on and on into the night.
It was a fine night for no sleep, however. The warm air, the smell of the vegetation, and the languorous song of the literary nightingale were entrancing, but I realized I’d be awake all night if this kept up and tried to banish Keats and the dryads, and all of the warm south. Every time I would start to drift off, the nightingale would start up again, I would wake, and my reveries would continue.
There are not many birds that sing by night—the loon of North American lakes, the mockingbird, and of course owls. In Europe the nightingale is the most famous nightsinger, although the sedge warblers and even the skylark will sound off periodically. Unfortunately, this beautiful singer is rarely found anymore in England, except in the south.
The disappearance of the legendary singers, such as the loon and the nightingale, and the decline of the full-throated dawn choruses of North America and Europe are some of the saddest losses brought on by the multifarious environmental ills that beset the modern world. Birds still try to sing at dawn, of course, but any older person who has lived in the country or well-aged suburbs will tell you that they don’t sing as fully as they used to. And yet birdsong was once the essence of poetry. The nightingale alone could fill pages of critical analysis.
Birds don’t think of poetry when they sing, of course. They are thinking nasty thoughts, like “War” or “Territory” or “Sex.” But if indeed they are considering the matter at all, they are also thinking “Light.”
Although birds call and make noise throughout the year, most do not sing in winter. They reserve the organized combination of notes they produce to attract mates, identify and broadcast their territorial boundaries, and advertise themselves as good mates for spring, the mating season. And in the birdly mind (actually in the birdly gonads), spring begins on their winter grounds with the increasing sunlight, as early as February.
Ornithologists have conducted elaborate and detailed studies of the role of light in the inducement of song, one of them undertaken by the great American naturalist Aldo Leopold, who, using a sensitive photometer, measured the relationship between morning song and light intensity. He uncovered some interesting but logical facts about birdsong. For example, a cloudy dark dawn will delay the onset of singing, and a bright moon will start birds singing sooner. Other naturalists have documented the fact that different species begin singing at different times as the dawn light increases, a fact that was well known to those in the past who lived closer to nature than we do. Even in so crowded a place as sixteenth-century Verona the residents were familiar enough with the different hours at which birds would begin singing to tell time by the song. We know this, or can guess at it, because Romeo and Juliet knew by means of birdsong when their night together was coming to an end. Romeo thinks he hears the lark and dawn is breaking. Juliet says it was the nightingale, and that it is not yet day. Romeo persists, and then they see the streaks of light lacing the clouds in the east. The song of the nightingale has ended. The lark begins to sing and their night of love has come to an end.
(They also knew a thing or two about resounding metaphors: “It is the east,” Romeo opines, “and Juliet is the sun!”)
There is a schedule, more or less, of birdsong, even after the first light. Robins start off the dawn chorus in North America; they begin singing as soon as they wake up. European robins delay their singing by a few minutes. The European blackbirds wait even longer, and the chaffinches longer still. It all reverses at dusk, and some of the most beautiful songs, such as those of the wood thrush and the veery, emerge from the mystery of the North American eastern forests long after the sun has set.
If ever there is any question as to the role of light in birdsong, one has but to spend time in the field during an eclipse. The year before I left on my solar transit, there was a full eclipse of the sun around three in the afternoon. I went out as the light began to fade and noticed all around me the onset of bird calling, chirping robins, cardinals whistling sadly, titmice sounding off, and the little “phoebe” whistles of the chickadees. The calling and singing continued as the moon crossed the sun and the darkness increased. Then, for about eleven minutes, the woods were quiet as night. As the sun slowly reappeared, the calling began again.
It was an eerie event, the first time I had ever been in a full eclipse, and it was not only the birdsong that created the bizarre natural environment but also the strange, ghostly light hanging over the woods and fields, a haunted coppery dusk at three in the afternoon.
Up to that time, all I knew about eclipses was a scene from some old racist jungle movie in which the captive white explorer, who is about to be burned at the stake and eaten by the restless natives, knows that an eclipse is about to occur and orders the sun to disappear just before the fires are lit. Terrified, the natives free him. He then commands the sun to return and is declared a god.
Experiencing the real thing, I could understand why so rare an event as the disappearance of the sun, or even the moon, would cause consternation among preliterate people. Many elaborate rituals evolved during eclipses to encourage the sun to return. In North America, the Ojibway people used to shoot flaming arrows at the sun to rekindle it, and one of the northwest tribes, the Chilcotin, would desert their huts, pack up for a long journey, and then circle the village as if traveling, thus encouraging the sun on its passage through the eclipse.
In the past, much of the magic and the sky observation and the development of astrology and, later, astronomy began as a means of predicting eclipses. In the earliest eras of civilization, astronomers in both China and the Near East had worked out the astronomical schedules by which eclipses occurred and were able through their record keeping to announce the event. Part of the power of the priestly classes sprang from this nearly incomprehensible ability.
The next day I rose late, took a café au lait with a few hunks of buttered bread with jam, and then rode at a leisurely pace through the pines toward Arcachon. By late afternoon I came to the Dune of Pilat, a vast mountain of sand, much dominated by tourists, but relatively clear at the time since it was still off-season. I climbed the dune, sat there watching the sea, scanning Cap Ferret on the other side of the bay, and decided to push on, feeling more and more crowded by summer houses and tourist shops and roads. It was clouding up now, and a little colder, and by the time I got to Arcachon it was raining, so I found a small hotel, docked my bike, and made the best of it, although there is nothing sadder than a summer resort area, off-season, in a cold rain. I went to a restaurant and tried to drown my sorrows with Arcachon oysters and hot fish soup, but it didn’t work. I needed Griggsy and his long drunken discourses.
It was still raining the next day, but I set out through the now seemingly dreary pines for Pyla, pedaling along amidst the whir of passing cars and trucks. By the time I got to the town it was sheeting down and I stopped in a café to warm up. There was no apparent rural road to Bordeaux on the map, and I knew from previous experience that the land between the coast and the city was flat and tedious and that approach to the city itself was a hideous termite nest of ugly roads. So, taking a cue from my Madrid experience, I called my friend and told him I was taking the train to town that afternoon. He gave me directions from the station and said he would try to prepare an evening meal.
When I had first come to Europe as a young and innocent student, I had spent a few months in Nice and had fallen in with a crowd of fellow student vagabonds from various parts of the globe who would collect every day in a small café on a back street and eat each night in a cheap restaurant run by a fat man with a pet rabbit named Doudoule, who ranged freely among the tables begging salads. Derek was one of the group, a rather lost fellow who was working on his novel (nothing rare about that, it should be said, everyone was working on a novel, including me). Sad soul that he was, this Derek had somehow attracted his opposite, a lively, blue-eyed girlfriend from Paris named Geneviève, who accompanied him everywhere. They were forever splitting up and then getting back together, and when Geneviève moved to Bordeaux, Derek, like a loyal dog, had followed. She commanded him to live apart, however, and found new company.
Derek’s quarters in Bordeaux were actually far better than those he had had in Nice. It was a narrow, somewhat dark little spot with a courtyard and a tiny kitchen, but a warren of small bedrooms upstairs, where I was escorted by the shuffling Derek, who greeted me wearing slippers and a bathrobe, even though it was four in the afternoon.
“Sleep here,” he commanded, pointing to a narrow palette on the floor.
He had put on a little weight since I last saw him and wore horn-rimmed glasses low on the bridge of his nose and was unable, or did not bother, to control his hair.
That night we went out to dinner with Geneviève and her new gentleman, an amusing fellow named Bertrand, who during dinner tried to convince her that veal meat came from an animal called the veal, which was raised in mountain pastures along with sheep. She was a city woman, born and raised in Paris, but she knew enough to realize, insistent though he was, that this was yet another one of the fantasies with which he amused himself. Derek plodded through his soup and fish and slurped his wine, while Geneviève and her gentleman bantered.
Geneviève had not changed at all, even after eight years. I remember her well from sunny beaches at Juan les Pins, where some of us would repair to bask. I had only been in Europe a few months when I first met her, and most of that time in Catholic Spain where, among certain classes at least, it was still the custom for proper young women to be accompanied by an older female escort when you took them out. I remember my pleasant surprise when, at Juan les Pins, Geneviève and her friend Suzie stripped off their tops to sunbathe. You could still be arrested back in America for that.
Truth be told, while in Nice I had rather envied this Derek and his relationship with Geneviève; I coveted her myself. What I remember best about her were those sunny afternoons at the beach, usually without Derek, who would stay at his café table writing. I had come to Nice out of the dark squalor of New York City—the narrow, windy, litter-strewn gray streets where the sun rarely penetrated. I was working there to get the money to go to school in France, and I left in darkness in a thankless snowy March and arrived in Nice in late May just as the spring sun was reaching its full force. The first day in town I went down to the little rocky beach below the promenade and leaned back against the seawall and blasted out all the evils of a winter in the city.
Bordeaux, by contrast, was turning out to be reminiscent of March in New York. Another period of rain set in so I stayed put for a few days and sniffed around the city, sometimes having a drink or lunch with Geneviève, mostly trying to avoid my living quarters.
On one of these excursions, in the local history museum I came across some fresh news on an ancient Roman cult that I had been interested in ever since I began my solar obsessions.
Some years back workers in Bordeaux were excavating a foundation for a new parking garage when the backhoes burst into an underground chamber. Inside was a sarcophagus with a carved figure in a Phrygian hat seemingly emerging from a stone. He held a torch in one hand and a knife in the other. Other figures were discovered in the chamber, and the artifacts and the statue were identified by archeologists as one of the many underground sanctuaries of a late Roman cult known as Mithraism.
According to the tenets of this cult, the god Mithra, who was born out of a rock, was a solar deity, a sort of Promethean intermediary between the god of the sun and humankind. The cult arrived in Rome, brought east, it is speculated, by Roman soldiers or prisoners from Syria and Persia. Scholars theorize that the cult, with its solar-based tenets, was an offshoot of the Zoroastrianism in which the god Mithra was a mediator between the god of the sun, Ahura-Mazda, and the evil god of darkness, Ahriman. But recent scholarship suggests that the cult was an original and new faith, similar to Christianity, which had appeared in Rome at about the same time. The two cults share many attributes, and as Christianity gained in power, the established church began to see the Mithraic cult as a blasphemous parody of their own practices. In fact the opposite may be true; Christianity seems to have adapted its rituals from the earlier cult, including its solar origins. One of the reasons Biblical scholars are so interested in Mithraism is that the cult holds the promise of shedding new information on the cultural dynamics that led to the rise of the Christian faith.
Jesus and Mithra share the same birthday, for one thing, the 25th of December, which is also of course the time of the winter solstice, when the god of the sun, who has been in a slow decline since the end of summer, overcomes the god of darkness and the length of the days begins increasing. Another contemporary Roman cult, the sol invictus deus, the Unconquered Sun, established (reestablished, actually, from earlier gods) by the emperor Aurelian in A.D. 274, shared the same holiday. Both Christians and members of the Mithraic cults would meet in small hidden, underground chapels, both practiced baptism and the use of holy water, and both celebrated with communion ceremonies of bread and wine, as well as communal meals. The followers were consecrated in both faiths, believed in the immortality of the soul, and even thought of themselves as soldiers of their faith. In Mithraism, many of the adherents were probably soldiers, although unlike Christianity, it appears that only men were admitted. There was an elaborate multitiered initiation process in Mithraism in which the initiates moved upward through a series of seven grades to full membership. One of these, the second highest, was called the Sun Runner.
The typical mithraeum or chapel was a small rectangular subterranean chamber, about 75 feet by 30 feet with a vaulted ceiling. An aisle usually ran lengthwise down the center of the temple, with stone benches on either side on which the cult’s members would recline during their meetings. On average, a mithraeum could hold perhaps twenty to thirty people at a time. At the back end of the aisle there was a statue or bas-relief of the central icon of Mithraism: the so-called tauroctony or “bull-slaying scene” in which the god of the cult, Mithra, is shown in the act of killing a bull. There were many hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Mithraic temples in the Roman empire. The greatest concentrations have been found in the city of Rome itself, and in those places in the empire (often in the most distant frontiers) where Roman soldiers—who made up a major segment of the cult’s membership—were stationed. Since they were all underground, as the development of modern Europe proceeded, more and more of these ancient temples turned up, as in Bordeaux during the construction of a modern-day parking garage.
One of the best preserved of these mithraea is an exposed underground chamber in Ostia Antigua just outside Rome in which an opening in the roof of the cellarlike chapel is arranged so that at certain times of day the sun will penetrate into the depths and illuminate the images of Mithra killing the bull. In most of the images of the bull-slaying scenes Mithra is accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion, and the scene is depicted as taking place inside a cave, not unlike the mithraeum itself. This image was always located in the most important place in every mithraeum, like an altar, and obviously held great significance.
The current thinking is that the bull-slaying scene is an astronomical star map, not unlike the Cretan bull-leaping frescoes at Knossos. This interpretation is based on the fact that every figure found in the standard bull-slaying scenes has a parallel among a group of constellations in the Zodiac. According to this theory, the bull represents the constellation Taurus. The dog is Canis Minor, the snake, Hydra, the raven is Corvus, and the scorpion, Scorpio. Mithraic art in general is often associated with astronomical imagery—the Zodiac, various planets, the moon, individual stars, and, of course, the sun.
Recent interpretations of this arcane and seemingly obscure, insignificant religion are now taking the imagery a step farther and arguing that the solar god Mithra conquering the bull is a celestial prediction of future ages and a symbol of the power of the conquering sun—he who shifts and controls the cosmic sphere. Given the pervasive influence of astrology in the Greco-Roman period, a god possessing such a power would clearly have been eminently worthy of worship. Since he had control over the cosmos, he would automatically have power over the astrological forces determining life on earth, and would also, like Jesus, possess the ability to guarantee the soul a safe journey through the celestial spheres after death.
Mithraism was not the only solar cult to arise in Rome in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ. Often these new religions arose as a result of visions experienced by a given emperor, the best known of which was the supposed conversion of the emperor Constantine at the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge in A.D. 312. Legend holds that during the battle—or in some versions in a dream the night before the battle—Constantine saw a cross in the sky directing him to march under this sign if he would be victorious—which he was. Curiously, however, there had been a similar conversion some forty years earlier when, during a battle, the troops of the emperor Aurelian saw a vision of an ancient and all-powerful Syrian solar deity, El Gabel, and emerged victorious from the battle. Aurelian interpreted this as a sign and modified the cult to establish a new solar-based religion in Rome, the cult of sol invictus, the Unconquered Sun, which soon became the official religion of the state. A temple of the Campus Agrippa was dedicated to this god on December 25th in the year A.D. 274, the feast day of Mithra.
The cult was dispersed following the death of Aurelian, and the next emperor, Diocletian, reinstated the old gods of the empire and began a campaign against other religions and cults, the first instance of religious persecution—pagans generally were more tolerant of other religions, and even willing to take new gods into their pantheons. In 303 Diocletian began “The Great Persecution,” which sent many Christians to the lions. All this ended with Constantine, whose mother was a Christian and whose father was a devotee of the Unconquered Sun. Things could have gone the other way. Not two years before his conversion to Christianity, Constantine was leaning toward the solar worship of his father.
The emperor Julian, who lived during this same period of religious turmoil in Rome, had a theory that the sun was a shield from a more powerful force that lay behind the visible entity we see in the sky. Julian was related to Constantine but he reinstated paganism upon his ascension to the throne and began criticizing Christianity. Although he preached tolerance, he and his associates recognized Helios as the sole god. He claims in his famous “Hymn to the Sun” that even as an untutored child he knew that the sun, Helios, was the only god. There were two aspects to Helios, the visible entity that rose every day in the east, but that was only a manifestation of the Invisible, the great source that lay behind the sun.
One day having a drink with Geneviève, we got into a discussion of poor Derek and his slow-moving progress on his novel. He had been working on said novel, or at least writing something, so he claimed (no one had ever seen a single line), for eight years, and Geneviève, who had become a sort of solicitous sister to him, was worried that if he ever finished, he would die. Or perhaps he would die if he did not finish. One afternoon we hatched a plan to take him out to Saint-Emilion to have lunch and drink some good wine and try to shake him out of his routine.
That weekend Bertrand drove the three of us out in his tiny Fiat, Derek and I squashed thigh to thigh in the back, our knees jamming the back seat. We stopped at a vineyard in Libourne and had a taste of wine, and then again at the famous Cheval Blanc vineyard, and then continued on and parked the car at the base of the town.
Saint-Emilion is another stop on the old Santiago route. Pilgrims walking down from Breton would halt there at the hostels, and I was interested to visit this place, not only for the wine. The town is located on a rise at the head of a cleft in the Dordogne River plateau, and the road rises up from the valley floor between two steep vine-covered slopes. It is considered one of the most beautiful of the wine district villages.
While the three of them ascended to look for a good place to have lunch, I got them to drop me off below the village and took a little walk along the country lanes that surround the town. Although the vines were still dormant, or just budding up, the good green earth was fresh and flowers were blooming or just coming into bloom on the verges and lanes around the base of the town. Here were the beloved flowers of the European spring—the primrose and the buttercup, harebells and gillyvor, Marybuds, and mints, spurge, and celandine, and little sweet violets breathing out from the banks and scenting the air as I passed. After three days in rain and city life, I felt the need to stretch my legs, and having found a little rutted track below the walls, I circumambulated the whole town and came up to the center on the east side, past vineyards and the arching ruined walls of an old church.
From the heights I could see many of the famous vineyards of Saint-Emilion. Lining the banks of the Dordogne River on the west were the vineyards of the Libourne; just to the north, out of sight, lay the district of Pomerol; and beyond that the great vineyards of Bordeaux; and farther still, the jutting peninsula that held the famous vineyards of the Médoc, Rothschilds, Margaux, and St. Estephe; and then to the south, the district of Armagnac; and the Bergerac district to the northeast.
Why France, particularly this section of France, should end up producing some of the best wines in the world is a matter of much discussion, but a great deal is owed to a combination of soils and sun. Wine grapes need a warm spring sun to form flowers and a fine balance between rain and sun during the summer to set and ripen the grapes to yield the proper combination of sugars and acids needed for wine. A cold rainy sunless summer will give poor, acidic wines, a hot summer will sweeten them. An early frost can disturb the formation of sugar and cause the acids to increase and create a condition called acid rot. Good years, which according to vinters are few and far between, are the result of just the right amount of rainfall and sunlight, and a proper range of temperature during critical periods of the growing season. A good vintage is a much advertised statistic when it occurs, but in fact a so-called “good year” may not mean for all vintages. Because of the wide variation in microclimates and the little dips and valleys, or the presence of a strip of sheltering woods or a local hailstorm or damaging thunderstorm, one vineyard may have a good year while another, less than a mile away, will not have the same conditions and produce a bad or poor wine. All this is serious business in towns such as Saint-Emilion.
Soil is the other variable; it plays an important role in the acidity, sweetness, or bite of a given wine and around Bordeaux the soil consists, generally, of a rough gravelly mix above sands and clays, hardly the good rich soils one generally associates with other agricultural products. But the soils too are related to the sun. One of the reasons that the gravelly soils in this district produce a good wine has to do with light. Generally wherever possible growers like to plant on south-facing slopes, and the combination of direct solar energy and the rocky soils acts to collect and hold the warmth from the sun. Furthermore, the vines are generally pruned in such a way as to take advantage of solar power. The grapes are grown close to the soil if possible, which means constant cutting back of the naturally sprawling, climbing vines; the closer to the ground the better the maturation, since the sun’s reflection from the warm earth adds to the direct sunlight during the day and during the night the absorbed warmth radiates back to the grape. This has generated the evolution of many different structures to grow the grapes on, varying from district to district to take advantage of the local environment and angle of the sun. In Saint-Emilion the vines grow along long fencelike wires, for example. Some vignerons, or wine makers, leave two distinct branches, one to bear, and one to make the wood for the following year.
Although there are many species of wild grapes around the world, the grapes used in winemaking were developed from a single species, Vitis vinifera, which was originally believed to grow wild in Turkmenistan, between Samarkand and the Caspian Sea, roughly the same area that gave the world the tulip. Grapes used for wine are smaller than the eating varieties of grape, and generally have large seeds, or pips, and thick skins. From this single species, breeders have created countless varieties; over one hundred are used for wine-making in France alone.
In March in Bordeaux, the foot of the vines are either exposed or covered, depending on the spring rains, and later, the way I understand it (I have this from Bertrand, who gave us a long lecture at the first vineyard we stopped in at Libourne), the roots are uncovered for fruiting. By June, little yellowish clusters of flowers appear on the vines. And after pollination by insects, these begin to set grapes and fill in. Then the mystery begins.
As in all green plants, oxygen is absorbed from the atmosphere through the leaves, combined with water taken up from the soils, and then changed into starch. Driving this engine of food production, the singular element upon which the whole process depends, is the sun.
The word for this mystic process, photosynthesis, tells the story: photo, Greek for light, and synthesis, the Greek verb to make or produce. It is arguably the single most important chemical reaction in the sustenance of life on earth.
The whole process begins inside the leaf. Generally speaking, in most green plants the flat leaf presents a broad surface to the sun so as to catch as much radiant energy as possible. And the leaves arrange themselves on the plant stem or trunk in such as way as not to obscure one another from the precious, life-giving light. On a single large plant, a maple tree, for example, there may be as many as several hundred thousand leaves, a surface of as much as half an acre, all told, and all the day long each leaf absorbs sunlight madly, eight to twelve or more hours a day, throughout all the days of the growing season.
Just below the surface of the leaf is a clear layer of cells arranged in such a way so as to gather the full power of sunlight. They are swollen with countless microscopic specks called chloroplasts, which are filled with green chlorophyll and are so concentrated that the whole leaf takes on the color green. These receive the first radiant energy of the sun. The chlorophyll traps that energy, transforms it, stores it, and then passes it along into the plant through an elaborate chemical process of electron transfers involving water and oxygen. The end result is that these substances are combined and transformed into carbohydrates, which is to say the sugars or starches that form the base of virtually all the food chains on earth.
By midautumn in the Bordeaux region the grapes are ripe and ready for picking, usually from mid September to mid October. The art of the making of the wine, as opposed to the luck of a good wine, comes in at this time, as it is up to the vigneron to decide exactly when to pick. He, and nowadays, also she, looks at the color, notes how the berries pull from the stalk, and checks the appearance of the pulp inside the grape. And then if the grapes seem close to fullness, the vigneron sends samples to the vineyard chemist who presses out the juice and tests it for sugar content. Sugar content is directly related to the amount of accumulated sunlight over the growing season, but it increases toward the end of the season as the grapes ripen, depending on the daily weather conditions.
I got interested in this question of timing and made Bertrand discuss it at length at the various vineyards where we stopped. As far as I understood it, as the proper day approaches the vigneron maintains an ever more watchful eye, checking the weather reports on the local television stations, checking hourly updates, and measuring the sugar content, day by day, depending on the amount of sunlight, or the amount of rain or cloud cover. Finally, as ripeness approaches, the vignerons measure the sugars even by the hour. And then, finally, after six months of growing, through sun and rain, and dangers of frost and withering hot spells, the hour arrives. The grapes must be harvested immediately.
Now the larger vineyards have machines that can get the grapes in quickly, but when I was first in this district years ago, in September desperate managers would offer work to any passing student vagabond in order to get the grapes in as fast as possible. Although I never had to do it, friends of mine told me it was difficult work, long hot hours, and your hands subject to nasty gashes and scratches with the curved knife used to nip the clusters.
In the old days of the great manors, the lords who controlled this part of France decided the hour or day of the vendange. Since the grapes would ripen at different times according to the microclimates or layout of a given vineyard, this would mean that the local peasants would often have to watch sadly as the grapes in their own vineyards rotted, while those of the manor vineyard were still increasing their sugars—or vice versa, the lord would declare the day of harvest and the grapes of the underlings would have to be picked while they were still not fully ripened. Fortunately, in the nineteenth century this so-called ban de vendange was abolished.
Geneviève and company were in the town square on the west side and had found a good table in the sun. Bertrand had selected a modest bottle of Château Ausone and was in the process of boring Derek with a long lecture on the vineyard, claiming it was originally planted by a local Roman poet named Ausonius, which sounded believable enough until Bertrand began elaborating upon the sins and perversities of this Ausonius. I was learning to hold suspect anything he said.
“Andiamo Derek,” Geneviève said after lunch, “Bertrand will show you the town.”
Derek grunted.
“I’ll go,” I said.
Geneviève blew out her lips with classic French dismissal.
“We know you’ll go,” she said. “It is this old dog here we want to roust out of his kennel.”
“I am not in my kennel, as you call it. I am writing. Every day, I am writing.”
“Ten years, he is writing,” Geneviève said.
“Eh, Derék, you want some coffee?” Bertrand asked. “Have a coffee, Derek. Then we take you into the catacombs below the church. If you like you can die down there. Many have, skulls line the walls. Sacrificed virgins. Holy waters.”
Reluctantly, Derek rose, very like a tired old dog, and shuffled after us. I could appreciate—somewhat—his reluctance; Bertrand and Geneviève were an energetic, enthusiastic couple, extreme in the French theatrical sort of way. They told me over dinner of a “superb” adventure they had had the year before in Mexico where they had hiked through the forests in northern Chiapas and been set upon and “captured” by long-haired, stick-wielding Indians dressed in long white robes. These were, I believe, nothing more than the peaceful mountain-dwelling Lacandon Indians, who lived in terror of outsiders.
“We were wonderfully frightened,” Geneviève said.
Saint Emilion, the hermit monk who was the founder of this little town, lived in a cave under the town, and later a church was dug out of the rock where he lived. There is a little stone bench where the holy man slept and Bertrand tried to make Derek lie down on the bench and pray to finish his book. He said it was a custom of pilgrims to this place.
“I shall do nothing of the sort,” Derek said in English.
Geneviève rolled her eyes.
We continued our tour: deeper and deeper into various tunnel-like halls that gave onto claustrophobic chambers set with altars and niches containing images of saints. Up on the surface again we went into a little aboveground chapel, and there, above a rose window on the east side, I saw an image that verified my current solar theories.
Rarely in early Christian art does one see the face of God depicted, and yet there he was painted on the wall over the window, in all his glory. His head was round and bright, his beard was a golden color, and from all sides golden rays speared outward in a golden burst and spread across the walls. In short, he was an image of the sun.
In the Greek pantheon, the original sun god, Helios, is similarly depicted. He evolved into the shining god Phoebus Apollo, who was born on Delos and early on was associated with light. His first name, Phoebus, means brilliant, or shining, and in time he took over the role of Helios and became the sun god himself. It is he who drives the splendid chariot of the sun that rises up out of the sea after Aurora, the Dawn, opens the gates of the east each day. He crosses the sky, arcing high over the earth in summer, following a lower course in winter, and then descends in the western sea each night, bringing his horses around through the underworld to his palace in the east to wait for dawn.
The great father, Zeus, is also associated with many of the attributes of a solar deity. He has a shining halo around him, stars encircling his head. He is the controller of thunder, the caster down of lightning bolts, and the most powerful force on Olympus. But according the mythologists, he is a latecomer in the Hellenic tradition, having arrived from the north with other male sky gods with the invading Indo-Europeans who moved down into Greece from the steppes of Europe around 2000 B.C. His name is thought to be derived from the sky god Daos, who was associated with weather and thunder and lightning.
Even Mary and her son, Jesus, retain a few of the old solar connections. They are often associated with light, and wherever they appear, from the earliest Christian art to current altar images in the Catholic church, they both are depicted with the old solar symbol of the halo. The best evidence of these solar connections is the earliest. In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine began construction on a new basilica of St. Peter’s on the Vatican Hill that covered over a cemetery that had been located on the site. In the 1950s, in the course of archeological excavations, the cemetery was uncovered and the earliest known Christian mosaic was discovered. The image depicted Christ as the sun. He was driving a chariot, wore a flying cloak that streamed out behind him, and had a rayed nimbus around his head.
“What do you think of the catacombs, Derék?” Bertrand wanted to know. We were seated in the sun again, having another coffee. “Don’t you feel better?”
“I did like it, in point of fact,” Derek said. “Most interesting. I shall place a scene from these catacombs in my novel.”
“Come with me next week. I’ll show you more,” he said. “I have to go to Sarlat. We can take a side trip to the caves, and I will show you more mysteries. I will show you the elephant. You know, the mammoth.” He made a long sweeping motion with his right arm, from his nose outward, imitating a trunk. “You can set a scene there, too. The killer, a known cannibal, lurks in the deep interiors of Les Colombelles, feeding on tourists.”
“There are no killers in my novel.”
“No killers? How can you have a book with no killers?”
Derek merely shrugged at so base a question.
“I’ll go,” I said, spontaneously.
“We know you will,” said Geneviève. “He’ll go anywhere, Bertrand.”
“Evidently.”
I could tell he wanted to carry on with Derek, but Geneviève wisely set us in motion and we paid the bill and drove back to Bordeaux.
I actually had been in a few of these caves when I was younger, but it was all I could do to carry on as we wound deeper and deeper into the narrow passages. I kept thinking of the sky and having bizarre paranoid thoughts about possible cave-ins and the deep mysteries—the horror, in my view—of such places. Why these early artists, probably shamans, wound their way so deeply into the earth to create these fantastic images, and how in fact they even lit the spaces to see what they were doing, is still a mystery. In the mid–1960s, archeologists and anthropologists, working in concert, managed to determine that there was an element of time involved in the creation of these images, a season when the natural world was changing and herds were on the move. Shamans would descend at these times to create the paintings as a sort of sympathetic magic to aid with the hunt.
Cave art, and cave dwellings in this cold, glacier-dominated section of Europe, was made possible by the discovery, sometime in the obscured “dawn of man,” of fire. Archeologists are still not clear when fire was actually tamed; some say as recently as 250,000 years ago in Europe, when, of necessity, Homo sapiens entering the cold climates employed it to warm the frozen meat. Newer arguments are pushing the event as far back as one million years ago in Africa. But no matter when it started, almost every culture has a story of a trickster who steals fire from the sun and brings it down to earth for the benefit of mankind. In the West, our cultural hero was Prometheus.
In the Greek system, the children of heaven and earth, the Titans, created the gods, who subsequently rebelled and defeated the Titans, partly with the help of Prometheus, whose name means forethought. The work of the creation of humankind fell to him, aided by his brother Epimetheus, whose name means afterthought. Epimetheus created the animals and, in his scatter-brained way, gave them all the best attributes—speed, strength, feathers and the ability to fly, and shells to protect themselves. When he came to the creation of people there was nothing left. So Prometheus went up to the sun, to the great shining palace where the sun god, Helios, the child of the Titan Hyperion, lived. Prometheus stole the fire of the sun and brought it back down to earth and gave it to humankind, the best and most useful gift of all the gods.
In another version, Zeus is the keeper of the eternal flame, the solar representation. Prometheus stole the flame and hid it in a fennel stalk and brought it back down to earth. But both versions have the same sad ending. For this and other acts of generosity, Zeus had Prometheus chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day, whereupon it would grow back and be eaten again.
The twentieth century had its own Promethean myth. To some extent, in our time the old gods and heroes of the great mythic ages of the past are now the scientists. They attempt to break the codes of God, they make life artificially, and they have managed to steal and re-create the secrets of the sun. Early in the century, in 1902, the Curies isolated radium, the most powerful source of radioactivity, and work toward nuclear fission began. Radioactivity was believed by scientists to be the source of the long, seemingly eternal power of the sun. But by the 1920s physicists theorized that it was actually the fusion of hydrogen and helium that fueled the great fires of stars.
Research into atomic physics, as the scientists involved in the process well understood, had quasi-religious overtones, and the attempt to re-create the energy of the sun, to fuse atoms on earth, was also driven by a purported mythic battle, the conflict between the children of light (read the West) and the children of darkness (Communism), or so the conflict was characterized. In the autumn of 1952, here on earth, the dream was realized. The children of light gathered at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific to witness an experiment that had been set up on a nearby atoll called Elugaleb. On November 1st, dubbed the “Day of Trinity,” scientists working on the project in effect re-created solar fusion. As they watched, a vast fiery dome three and a half miles across rose in the air. After it settled—and dispersed—the islet of Elugaleb no longer existed.
President Truman, who had ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, said, without a trace of irony, that the weapon was created “for peace and security.”
Earlier, when the physicists detonated the first atom bomb, there was a remote possibility, expressed by some of the researchers, that the event would cause a chain reaction that would, in effect, ignite the world. The Greeks had a similar story. Apollo’s mortal son Phaeton one day deigned to approach the marbled halls of the sun and asked Phoebus Apollo for proof of his fatherly love. Apollo made the mistake of granting Phaeton anything he wished, so the rash youth asked to drive the chariot of the sun for one day. Apollo tried to convince him not to do it—the horses of the sun were a fiery lot who fed at night in pastures of ambrosia and were hard to control, even for the powerful sun god. But the rambunctious boy took the reins and shortly after Aurora threw open the gates of dawn, Phaeton urged the steeds forward and charged up over the horizon in a blazing stream of light.
Sensing an amateur at the reins, the horses immediately bolted. Phaeton lost control, and now free from their normal course, the horses of the sun ranged higher and higher up into the sky and headed northward toward the pole and the circling bears. The great serpent, who lies torpid around the pole star, grew warm and began to revive; the horses reared at the sight, turned and raced into the dangerous territory of the Zodiac. The snapping claws of the Crab grabbed at the chariot as it flew past, the Scorpion reached out and uncurled its tail to sting, the Moon drew back at the image of her brother racing below her, clouds and stars began to smoke and steam, and then in a disastrous course, the horses began a headlong dash for earth, cleaving the morning clouds in their dive. This was clearly the end of all that the gods so loved. The mountaintops of earth began to burn, the succulent plants dried and withered, deserts appeared in place of lush forests, the Sahara was created, trees burst into flame, whole cities and nations were consumed by fire, fountains and springs broke into a boil, snowy peaks melted, and the very earth caught fire and cracked open to reveal the dark lower kingdom of the dead.
All heaven was in a rage. The gods called out to Zeus to do something to save the world, and Earth herself pleaded with the great skygod to save her. And so he thundered and growled, rose from his throne, and came down from Olympus with a handful of lightning bolts. He sought out the boy. And then he drew back his mighty arm and cast his bolt. The lightning struck Phaeton and threw him from his blazing seat. He fell to earth, his hair flaming, and landed, steaming and smoking, in the river Eridanus in central Italy. The earth was saved.
The following evening, a Sunday, we all went out to dinner again at a small restaurant around the corner from Derek’s flat. It was not the best of dining spots in the city of Bordeaux by any means, but it did feature lamprey, a famous local dish. The dinner conversation, after the spirited repartee at Saint-Emilion, was lackluster, even a little sad. I had announced that I was leaving the next morning and none of us knew when we would meet again.
In the morning, wishing Derek the best of luck on his novel, promising to stay in touch, and leaving behind, where he would find it at his lonely dinner, a fine bottle of Margaux, I embraced my old friend, mounted my bicycle, and sallied forth toward fresh adventure.
I was headed north again, into the heart of the Aquitaine, where, for three hundred years, the troubadours and jesters and jongleurs wandered the same roads singing their poetry and paying homage to the fair ladies of that fortunate country.