THE SAME COUNTRY and not the same. Summer now, not spring. The same rental car—a Peugeot—and nothing like the same; all the models of everything had been changed. In thirteen years the French government had extended the autoroute through much of the Quercy, shortening the trip from Paris by an hour. Unless you happened to be me. If you were me, peering anxiously through the windshield with the road atlas on your lap, you’d get lost somewhere in the Paris banlieue and the trip south from the airport would take two hours longer than it took that other time, back when the map was written with the names only she knew how to pronounce.
Not everything was different. Tiny cups of bitter coffee along the way, a croque-monsieur. Around Châteauroux, the open fields of turned soil and vibrant yellow and cool green beginning to lose ground, gain complexity, geometry, grow humps; become the Limousin, old hill country of stone walls and red-tiled roofs. Then off the autoroute, onto the small roads that curved and dipped. Low hills already parched and half browned under the full blaze of summer, Roman-nosed sheep packed like salmon in meager wedges of shade offered by the odd plum or walnut tree, swallows perched on telephone lines like unused punctuation. The few cows paragons of bovine stillness. The valley and the narrow gray-blue river, the miles of jagged limestone walls, the hamlets and their simple white signs, the market town with the half-timbered facades in the square, the food shops where she’d shaped her tongue around the words and made them delicious.
I followed the river out of town until I lost sight of it. I climbed the road that wound up the side of the mountain. And then in my mirror the wide valley and the river were splayed out again.
My breath had quickened and I was beginning to sweat. At the top, on the plateau, I turned left, away from the single-lane road flecked with sheep droppings that led to the house where once, thirteen years before, Claire and I had stayed.
The nearest village sat on top of the mountain three kilometers away. Undoubtedly a place of significance once, with fortified walls built straight into the mountainside and long views of the valley. Though by now irremediably shrunken, several sizes too small for its own history, its constituent parts reduced to an épicerie with a FERMÉ sign hanging on its glass door, an auberge with eight rooms, and a pack of scrawny dogs who began barking at the sight of my car. There wasn’t even a café.
I parked in the tiny square beneath a brutally pruned chestnut tree and entered the Auberge du Soleil.
Behind the desk, leaning on it as though for support, stood a solidly built old man. He straightened up when he saw me.
“Monsieur, bonsoir.”
My French was halting at best. I asked for a room.
I was in luck, I understood him to say. Usually this time of year there were no vacancies. But a cancellation had opened a room. One of the better ones. Avec la vue, he said, though the price was of course reasonable. And might he ask for how long I would be staying?
I said I didn’t know. Exhaustion was taking over; it was difficult to speak any language. When he took my credit card he inquired whether I had ever been to the region before. Once, I mumbled, a long time ago. He waited for me to say more, but I shook my head and opened my hands in a helpless gesture, and on a chair nearby a gray scruffy dog woke from its nap and regarded me with interest. Then, with slow measured steps, the man helped me with my bags up the stairs to my room. There was no elevator.
The room was small: a bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, a sink hardly deep enough for both hands, the toilet and bath down the hall. He turned on the light and opened the shutters. The yellow walls were decorated with framed photographs of the town, its stone fortifications and magnificent views, and of Rocamadour and the celebrated statue of the Black Virgin that Claire and I had never seen.
The man and I stood there, gazing around the room and out the window at “le point de vue.” Dusk was falling. Across the valley lights had come on, winking at us like earthbound stars. He asked if there would be anything else. He appeared reluctant to leave. His manner was formal but friendly, unsmiling but intensely solicitous; inspired, it seemed, not so much by the business as by the company. Now and then he rubbed his hands together as if simply needing to feel them. They were used hands, hard-worked and thick-skinned, the color of old teak, and in the quiet between us the sound of their moving against each other took on, somehow, the properties of eloquent speech. I began to feel oddly moved by him. In the deep weathered creases of his face and the watery focus of his eyes I sensed something forsaken, a faded resignation like a vow endlessly kept but no longer reciprocated.
“J’espère que vous serez bien content ici, Monsieur.”
I was too tired to respond. Still, I was grateful to him for saying it. And when, with a last rub of his hands and a nod of his head, he left me to myself for the night, I felt his absence and was sorry he was gone.
Then I sat down on the bed, and within moments sank into a dreamless sleep.