BY ELEVEN, when I stepped from the cool shade of the auberge, the small village square was already an oven. In the fierce sunlight I stood blinking and partially dazed. There were no people that I could see. The heat of the paving stones reached up through the thin soles of my shoes, and the constant buzz of flies made it sound as though somewhere a power line were humming.
Nearby there were three stone houses of indeterminate age, shutters closed against the glare. The middle house had a wide downstairs window—a vitrine, unshuttered—and seemed a shop of some kind; but there was no sign, nothing to see inside but a single ladder-back chair, a rusted watering can, and a very still black-and-white cat that, had it not opened its eyes to watch me, I would have thought was stuffed. I turned away. Across the square two narrow roads met. One headed down into the valley; the other was a short dead end leading to a cluster of old stone houses, bisected by a cobbled walking path, the whole framed by the ancient fortifying wall at the edge of the promontory.
As I stood there a thickset woman carrying a heavy sack of flour on her shoulder trudged past. She wore a brown housedress and dusty black shoes, and her shoulders were broad, and her footsteps echoed dully off the paving stones. She turned onto the cobbled path and disappeared from sight.
Rousing myself, I walked around the side of the auberge to the épicerie. Today the sign on the glass door said OUVERT. I went in. A tiny one-room shop, its floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed according to some arcane theory of practical juxtaposition: boxes of rat poison beside cans of green peas, cartons of long-conservation milk next to dark and dusty bottles of Ca-hors. Behind a makeshift counter a doorway was hung with a fly curtain of green plastic beads. The place was empty; there was no bell to ring. I was thinking about leaving when I heard footsteps—and then through the fly curtain stepped the old man from the auberge, a blue smock covering the clothes he’d worn the night before. Around him the long strips of beads shimmied and ticked. Inclining his mostly bald head and half opening the palm of his hand in the direction of the shelves, he greeted me.
“Monsieur?” he said.
I asked if there was coffee.
“Oui. Voilà le café.” His palm opened fully as he politely directed me to the packages of coffee on his shelves.
I shook my head. “Ah, non.” I tried to mime a tiny cup of bitter coffee and my sipping it with pleasure—coffee already prepared. In the middle of my performance his mouth appeared to consider a smile, but wouldn’t commit.
“Attendez,” he said finally, and disappeared back through the curtain.
I waited. I didn’t mind. It was almost cool in the shop, the shelves with so many ordinary things to look at and name. You could not be lost here.
Then through the glass door I saw the old man’s scruffy dog trotting across the square, intent, his nose pointing with the certitude of a compass arrow. This wasn’t a village to him, but a kingdom of infinite possibility. Inexplicably, I felt a stirring in my chest. Then the old man reappeared, for some reason walking backward, the long strands of beads parting before him like a dime-store sea.
He turned around. His eyes were generous. On a round waiter’s tray were two tiny cups of coffee on saucers.
“Et voici du café,” he said.
We stood in his shop drinking the coffee.
His name was Delpon—which in the old tongue of the region, I understood him to say, meant “bridge.” He’d been born not ten kilometers from where we were standing. An uncle and an older brother had been in the Resistance during “la Guerre.” The brother was dead now fifteen years. His wife, too, was dead. Ma pauvre femme, Delpon said, a phrase of irrefutable simplicity.
He asked if I’d come to the Lot as a tourist, for the Lot was beautiful indeed and there were many tourists in the region during the summer, English and Americans mostly, but some Germans too. A Japanese couple was said to have passed through at one time, but that was just a rumor, said Delpon, for he had not seen them with his own eyes.
He waited, swirling the dregs of coffee around the bottom of the cup to soak up the remaining sugar and then finishing it in a swallow.
I inquired if by chance he’d met an American woman during the winter. It would have been in December, around Christmas. An American with long brown hair who stayed at an auberge in the area, and who then lived for a few months in a small house in the next hamlet.
All this I asked in my slow, halting French and it took a while.
Delpon set down his cup. He saw that mine was empty too, and with a surprising lightness of touch he lifted it from my fingers and set it on the tray. His expression had changed.
“It was here,” he said in French. “She stayed here.” Slowly, a gesture of respect, he took off the blue shopkeeper’s smock, folded it, and placed it on the counter beside the tray. He put his hand on my arm as if to steady me, and then added gently, “She is dead, you know?”
I said I knew.
He shook his head at the pity of it. “She was beautiful.” He paused. “It was clear,” he said. C’était clair.
Outside a car drove by, heading down into the valley. Appearing from nowhere, the village dogs charged after it barking, but quickly halted. It was just for show. They came trotting back, meek as rabbits, and soon disappeared again, each to his own corner of the kingdom.
“And the house where she lived?” I asked.
“A simple house,” he said. “Typical of the region. At the moment not occupied.”
“And the owner?”
“A local woman. I have known her many years. She was married to an American, but he died. She lives by herself on the other side of the river.”
“What is her name?”
“Madame Conner.”
The name sounded in my memory: the wife of Leland Conner, Lou Marvel’s childhood friend. So the property was still in the family.
“I would like to see the house,” I said. “If possible.”
Delpon looked at me. The little shop was quiet and filled with things of all kinds. Outside the sun was high and in the white heat not a soul could be seen. His eyes with their own losses seemed to read mine without effort.
“I will see what can be done.”