At the baggage claim in Geneva, my suitcase—a new red roller bag—is among the last to emerge onto the carousel. I pick it up and have ferried it only a short distance when I realize it feels lighter. Shit, I think, did customs search it and extract the meat? I wheel it to a bench and unzip the suitcase.
What I see is not for the squeamish. At first it appears to be a woman’s dismembered leg. But there’s no blood, only a shapely calf, bare, attached to a feminine foot. It takes me several seconds to realize it’s a prosthesis.
Also in the suitcase are two large packages of adult diapers and eight cartons of shortbread cookies. Nothing else. Where is the heroin? I wonder.
Feeling like a criminal, and yet also that I’ve been set up, I dash to the nearest security guard. This would be an opportune moment to speak French. Instead, we find ourselves being escorted to a sterile detention center. The red suitcase containing the woman’s leg is taken from us and we are told to wait in the holding room. I fill out some papers. The security guard tells us they’ve discovered who owns the leg, presumably the same person who has my bag: an elderly gentleman whose wife is in a wheelchair. The two of them live far away in the mountains, near Lake Lucerne, the guard says, and we must remain here until the couple realizes their mistake and comes back. It could be hours or days. It’s a very large inconvenience, he says.
The man leaves and Lowry makes a pallet of sweaters on the floor and goes to sleep. Erin curls up catlike in one tiny chair, her legs jackknifed over the armrest, feet on the end table. I pace like a tiger in the zoo. There’s nothing in the room but a clock. I feel my troops’ will is sagging to a new low, one from which no pep talk will rally them. Hang in there, I think, fatigue makes cowards of us all. We’re going to see John Berger, by God—keep the faith! When you’re trafficking in beauty, searching for the mother lode of excellence, of course the way should be lined with hardship!
When the bag finally comes, it is anticlimactic. I had envisioned the old woman stumping along with her peg leg, the man trolling my bag, perhaps an exchange in the center of the abandoned baggage area wherein we would get to see her put her leg on and become whole again. But when the bag arrives, it is being rolled instead by a man in a uniform—a general, it seems. Before I can claim it the general asks me to describe my bag’s contents, open it to verify, then sign some papers that, for all I know, warrant I shall never come to Geneva again. But the elk meat is still there! I shudder to think what the old woman thought when she saw that. Her first intake of breath as sharp and sudden as my own.
We trudge out of detention and through the empty airport—night has fallen—but our trial is not over yet. Due to some technicality—has a hold been placed on my passport?—we spend a terrible amount of time at the rental-car counter until, just at the edge of weeping, we regain our freedom. Quickly, before anyone can change their mind, we pile our bags into the car and make our way up into the French Alps, toward a village called Quincy, on the road to Mont Blanc and its perfect, snowy mass: a beauty so vast it can absorb almost all ugliness and imperfection.
After some stress navigating the cobblestone streets of Geneva in the dark, and a fruitless stop at the sole open grocery store on our route, we cross into France and begin to pass one merry little stone tavern after another. None of us has eaten anything since our morning toast at David’s, but the consensus is Drive on.
All day I’ve been trading phone calls with kind and patient Yves, John’s dreamy, fiercely intelligent son, who has given me meticulous directions to the place we’ll be staying, a pension run by friends of his. But when we finally roll into Quincy, in such darkness and beset with bone-deep exhaustion, we drive around the small town a couple of times and make multiple passes around a roundabout without locating the place. Given that I’ve already called Yves four or five times during the day—updating him about the luggage fiasco and the delays, getting directions, then clarifications on the directions—I’m determined not to destroy his peace one more time with yet another clang of the phone in the stillness of his country home. The trouble is I can’t read my own writing on the napkin scrap where I wrote it all down: Mansion something something; something about a hallway; something about a hill, and a security code.
We reach the cemetery at the edge of town and turn back. Then I spy a larger building on the hill, beneath a big church adorned with a cross, and I hope it’s our lodging and not simply someone’s nice home. Up the hill we go, through a series of gravel switchbacks, with tall grasses swishing the sides of the car. I park and we stumble out, desperate travelers. Three countries—England, Switzerland, and France—in this one day alone.
We approach with caution. All is dark inside the building, and when I pull on the door, it is locked tight—not so much as a wiggle. But beneath the handle there’s a little keypad, such as you’d find on a cell phone. Now I recall the four-digit number Yves gave me, which I thought was some kind of street address or telephone extension, but after I go back to the car for the napkin scrap, decipher the numbers, and key them in, the door clicks. Euphoria! We open it and step inside. At the top of a set of narrow stairs we find two empty rooms, one on the left and one on the right. The beds are neatly made and we pile in, hoping they are ours. Goldilocks.
I’ve met John before, after a literary festival in Lyon, when a mutual friend, Marc Trivier, a Belgian photographer and stonemason, introduced us. Elizabeth was with me then. In John’s backyard, where apple trees were blossoming, we sat in the sunlight drinking cassis made from the blackberries in his garden while he smoked cigarettes, and I remember the smoke blue in that light, with Mont Blanc above us so close we could feel the icy draft of its glaciers. We visited about our respective valleys, his in France and mine in Montana, and how nice it was to live among people who worked with their hands, and how important it was for a writer to work in some physical way. Then John had to leave. His wife of fifty years, Beverly, had just been diagnosed with cancer, and was on her way to another doctor that evening.
It got me thinking how fine it would be, as John had Yves and his family, to have my children, and eventually my grandchildren, living in the same village, only a nice walk away. Taking Sunday meals together, holidays. For a long time this is the way things used to be for us as a species. And it’s how it was for me, until my daughters went off to college. I did my best to carve out such a life, and here in Quincy, John was still living it, as was Yves, with the sweetness I once had. Unbeknownst to John and Beverly on the day we met, in less than two months all of that would be gone from them. Beverly was dying, though they did not yet know how bad it was. We enjoyed the meal and the company, and went to bed that night sated and content.
Up until a couple of years ago I envisioned easing into a dignified geezerhood of exactly the sort John was living, good-natured bantering with a longtime spouse, with the increased congeniality of having passed through even more years, and challenges, together. A lengthy campaign, perhaps, but with peace finally inhabiting the land. With parenting duties mostly behind us, I imagined, Elizabeth and I would do some traveling and take a breather before preparing for Act Two, grandparenthood. I was ready. Now, however, those images had disappeared—there was nothing to sustain them—and I could think of nothing to take their place.
What I love most about John is how, though an intellectual, to some degree he turned his back on what many would call civilization and moved far up into the mountains, into a beautiful little valley, and immersed himself into his art as if diving deep into a lake.
John writes best of all about peasants, in a trilogy of books called Into Their Labors, but he is probably better known for his novel G., which won the 1972 Man Booker Prize (the profits of which he is famous for having split with the Black Panthers). His book of art criticism, published the same year, called Ways of Seeing, which grew out of his TV series for the BBC, has sold more than a million copies, and has never been out of print. He has published scores of essays of art criticism. I love the clean, elegant, and direct way he explains what is going on within the brushstrokes of a painting, and beyond the edges of the canvas.
You can read all you want about how to write. But to stand in the presence of living greatness has inexplicable and inexhaustible value. I never did sit on Miss Welty’s back porch and sip lemonade with her, never did stroll her backyard with her and shoot the shit about metaphor—but I remember tiny things, tiny gestures, from my mentors: Harrison’s labored breathing, and the rasp of his voice in telling a story. The terrible, wonderful mischief in Sedaris’s eyes during my fiasco at the butcher shop. It’s not that I think John, or any other hero, is going to lean forward and say to Lowry, or Erin, or Cristina, “Begin each morning by writing at least four sentences in iambic pentameter,” or dispense any other advice. I just want my mentees to know what greatness looks like—to see it in person, and not just in the space between the lines.
We’re due at John’s farmhouse by noon on this lazy Sunday, and in the late morning we load the rental car with our gear and food and begin to wind our way through the green countryside, and along a river flanked on both sides by forested mountains. We pass lakes seemingly too small and shallow to hold any significant fish, and yet people stand fishing alongside them. Farther on, brightly clad men and women have gathered with ropes, but no helmets, to climb the cliff faces, some of them already attached to the rock, like spiders. All the while the road curves up through green fields and snowy mountains rising all around us like a dream.
We enter the smallest of villages—just a tight cluster of stone farmhouses—and then John’s home is before us. There’s a motorcycle parked beneath the porch, beside a neatly stacked woodpile, and Yves’s van is also there, filled in the back with the most gigantic rhubarb ever—absurdly so, as all we aim to make of it is one pie.
John is not yet present, but Yves is, and the three of us step forward, shake hands, embrace him. Yves is still youthful, and his daughter, Melina, is seven. Together they help us carry our boxes of food inside to the kitchen, which could be a tableau from 1930, or 1880 for that matter: pie safes, worn tables, church pews for benches.
Melina is delighted by the activity. She exudes the confidence that inhabits seven-year-old girls—I remember this elixir as the wellspring of my own girls’ early years. They’ve grown into wonderful adults, but what a magical time that window was between the ages of five and nine. Melina glides from her father’s elbow out into the space around each of us, curious as to what each is doing. She drifts from one to the other, asking what she can do to help. A dreamer and a doer. Peel the potatoes, deleaf the rhubarb, slice, dice, wash, mix, stir; she fits right in, a good hand. I feel a tug at my soul. This is the life I wanted for myself, my family, my children. I wanted my mother to know my daughters, to know lazy sunlit Sunday afternoons such as this one, filled with the quiet pleasures of family and food, but the closest we came to it was my mother getting to feel Mary Katherine, our first, kick in Elizabeth’s stomach when she was pregnant. It was not enough. It is not enough.
John writes beautifully about his own mother, and in his 2005 novel, Here Is Where We Meet, the veil disappears between the living and the dead—who, if they have burned brightly enough in life, never fully go away. The narrator, an old man himself, motorcycling through years of memories, and the great cities of the world, confesses to his mother of having been scared by one thing after another. “I still am,” he says. “Naturally,” she reassures him. “How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless, or you can be free, you can’t be both.”
At last John himself enters. He has been in the front part of the house, whether napping or reading—or, more likely, writing—I do not know. He comes striding into the room with great animation for a man of any age, much less one nearing ninety. My first impression? How fit he is. He’s dressed in navy pants and a white long-sleeved shirt, over which he’s wearing a powder-blue fleece vest. He looks like a mountaineer, a guide. His hair is whiter than it was just two years ago—less silvery, more snowy—and his shoulders a little more stooped, but he remains sprightly, robust, coming around the long table like a relay runner rounding the final turn. The only sign of Beverly’s passing since I last saw him are his eyes, broken by grief.
But what a hug! He’s almost speechless, except that his brilliant smile says everything. “Welcome, my friends,” he says, grasping for all of our hands at once. “You have come so very far, I cannot believe it. This is incredible what you are doing. My heart is”—he pauses—“my heart is too full, it is overflowing.” He stands there, smiling at us, his eyes glistening, and grips our hands with his powerful stonemason’s grip.
Holy shit, is all I can think. We did it. We’re here.
John is glowing. “This is so wonderful, what you all are doing,” he says again. “This is just magnificent.” He moves among us in the kitchen much as his granddaughter did, touching us on the elbows, on the back. Studying us, and the meal that is unfolding in his space. The brown curls of potato peels, the flesh of the potatoes, opening white as bone, brilliant in the spring light through the window. The ivory pool of flour spread on the chopping-block table in the center of the kitchen. The bowl of raw elk meat, which we’ve kept moderately chilled with ice cubes; the green-gold chunks of ginger being minced. Rhubarb everywhere.
John’s eyes shine again and he addresses each of us one by one, speaking in French. He speaks for quite a while, and we’re smiling, but as he goes on, our faces, though polite, must reveal our confusion.
“Oh!” he cries, switching back to English, “how foolish of me! Forgive me, I did not realize…”
And for the thousandth time it occurs to me that I really should try harder to learn something besides s’il vous plaît and merci.
“The mere fact of your presence feeds me in a way that no meal ever could,” John says in his rich, deep, gentle voice. And there are no words in English or French that could have made us feel more at ease.
He takes a bottle of wine from his cabinet, opens it, pours, hands a glass to each of us. “Santé.” He’s not having any—“I’ll wait for the meal,” he says—but for the rest of the afternoon he does not allow our glasses to get empty.
As Erin washes lettuce leaves for the salad, Melina chops the rhubarb, and Lowry peels and slices the potatoes, I work the dough for the pie and John continues to shower praise upon us.
You can pretty much tell, even in the rolling, how a crust is going to turn out, and this one is so-so. It doesn’t have that magical mix of sticky and light, that perfect density and stretch. But that kind of crust is rare. All you can really do is be careful with the ingredients, pay attention, and take care of the little things: chill the butter, the water, and the shortening; make the measurements level; be attentive to moisture; refrigerate the dough before rolling it out. Most of all, though, don’t handle it too much, because the heat from your hands can destroy the potential for flakiness; as if there lies buried within you some curse that will ruin anything you try to hold on to for too long.
Marc, the friend who introduced me to John two years earlier, arrives with his friend Daniel, also a photographer. They were in Switzerland for the weekend, and when I told him I’d be going to see John, he said he’d try to stop in. The guests pass easily between English and French. John makes sure all of our wineglasses are filled again, then retires to his chambers for a spell while we continue to assemble the food.
I go outside to make a fire in the grill for the elk burgers. The side porch there is stacked neatly with firewood, and an old maul and wheelbarrow lean against the farmhouse. Crepe myrtle hangs and droops like an old woman’s jewelry.
The burgers are prepared just the way I like them, with the diced ginger and kosher salt and coarse black pepper mixed in, along with soy sauce this time instead of Worcestershire. But the wood smokes too much, and smells like creosote, as if I’m cooking over a fire made of old railroad ties. And how am I going to melt the stubborn blue cheese atop the burgers with no way to trap the heat? The burgers will cook faster than the cheese, and the longer I try to melt the cheese, the drier the burgers will become.
The only saving grace in this regard is that I have already been informed by all parties European that they desire their meat to be as well done as possible. (Perhaps this has something to do with the sight of a large Ziploc of thawed and bloody meat.) “Dry,” Marc clarified when I asked if they were really sure they wanted it well done. “The drier the better.” And he shrugged. “That’s how it is here,” he said. “Burn it.”
I wish I had more confidence to cook it the way I want it. I wish I had poorer manners, more brashness. Here, eat this, I’m going to tell y’all how things should be. You’re mistaken in your tastes and values. Because the glory of these burgers is when they’re big and round and juicy, cooked just until the juices begin to run clean out of them, trickling like snowmelt from the side of the mountain in June. A flavor explosion of medium rare.
But as I squat by the smoldering black char wishing I had brought my mesquite, a feeling of great calm descends on me. Cows are grazing on the hill above me, pushing through the belly-high green grass, their bells tinkling and clanking. Apple blossoms float like snow just as they have in these mountains every spring, or for as long as agrarians and pastoralists have lived here. The Old Country. Even the limestone cliffs above the village have been polished smooth by the creep of time. Meanwhile I’m confident in my chefs back in the farmhouse. We’ve made these dishes before. Besides, there’s no need to impress John—he’s going to savor whatever we’ve got, even if I serve him a little black briquette.
As luck would have it, all the pieces come together at once, and on the long table, with all of us gathering, it looks magnificent. Melina has picked immense bouquets of wildflowers—sunflowers, daisies, roses, lilies—that the salad leaves complement perfectly. The gratin glistens in the late-afternoon light and the rhubarb pie rests by a window, fragrant with sugar and butter and browned crust. Once again, John is walking around the table pouring wine for everyone. There’s bread and cheese. We’ve got everything we need.
We eat wantonly, indiscriminately. Whatever looks good and is on a nearby serving platter, we reach for. Let the lettuce merge with the coins of gratin, let the garlic-infused cream and jalapeños adorn the lumpy little meat cakes. Sometimes there’s small talk, but everyone is hungry and for the most part it’s just eating. From time to time I look around at Lowry and Erin and try to gauge what they might be thinking. They’re pretty quiet, and a little glassy-eyed, and I feel certain the three of us are under the same spell.
Pie time. Ideally we wouldn’t have eaten quite so much before serving dessert, but so be it. In anticipation, John, our faithful sommelier, rises and navigates the long table once more, refilling glasses, the wine like rich paint in our sunlit crystal goblets. He places his hand on each of our shoulders as he pours, trembling not with age, it seems, but joy. He sits back down at the head of the table, just to my left—Yves is at the other end—and I can’t resist letting loose the question I’ve been carrying around and trying to ask each of my mentors, timing be damned.
“I’m here to share you, my hero, with these two young writers I believe in deeply,” I tell John. “But I’m also here for myself. What do I need?” I ask him. “What will life look like, from here on out?”
If he was unprepared for such an earnest question, or considers it a gauche imposition, he does not show it. And although the timbre of my voice is casual and the words are not arranged with any particular gravity or elegance, he recognizes the intensity behind the calm. He locks my eyes with his own: those icy, unclouded blue eyes, translucent in their depthlessness, unsettling if they weren’t so beautiful.
“Courage,” he says. His answer has such emotion in it: firmness, understanding, and gentleness, with more sorrow in his voice than I would have expected. “Courage,” he repeats, not as incantation but as echo, a shadow of the first utterance. As if the word, the thing, is so substantial that it has that shadow at all times.
Something’s passing between us, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s remembering standing where I am, at a point in time where he still—despite some significant years having passed by—had the opportunity to make a change, maybe a dramatic one, with his life. Is that what brought him to this farmhouse in the mountains, with a few peasant farmers for neighbors, and the freedom of anonymity?
“You come to a spot,” he says, leaning forward—his eyes still have not lost their lock on mine, so that I feel like a horse being gentled—“and you make the hard decisions and go on.” His eyes bore deeper now, telling me that he’s been where I am. “It’s hard,” he says. “Not many do. That’s all I’m going to say.” He straightens up in his chair, holds my gaze long enough to imprint these things, and then we speak of it no more.
After that, the conversation shifts in tone, takes on even more depth. At the other end of the table, Yves is talking about the differences between store-bought meat and animals acquired by oneself, whether hunted or raised, and specifically about a pig he raised a full year for slaughter, and the ceremony of the day they killed it.
He speaks of the gratitude they felt for it, and how every step of the process—the cleaning and butchering, then the curing—was done with the attentiveness of art. He uses the word sacred. Before eating, they passed around the knife that had been used to kill the pig. The same knife they then used to carve the meat. “It was very special,” he says in his quiet way. “Very moving.”
I tell the story of the elk we have just consumed, how it stood at the top of the mountain, in the sunlight, while I was hiking up out of the valley’s autumnal fog—how the elk was poised at the leading edge of that fog, as if it were a lake to which he’d come to water. I could see him on the other side, as the fog tendrils began to burn away in the light of the day, though he could not make out what I was. I raised the rifle and took him, and was grateful. I spent days afterward cleaning, butchering, and packing him out, while in subsequent days ravens and eagles circled what remained, coming in to feed on the bones, and after I was gone and had taken everything, bears and wolves came and carried away the bones. I froze the meat, and now, a year later, have carried it to John.
John excuses himself from the table, disappears into the back room, and returns with a large envelope. It’s the loose galley pages of a book Yves and John have written together: Flying Skirts, which was Beverly’s nickname. John hands the package to Yves, and Yves, with even greater care than his father, pulls out the pages, the loose pieces that will be sewn and bound into the book, not bringing Beverly back to life, but fanning her spirit back into their lives.
Yves delivers the book to me with both hands. I take it in my open arms like a tablet, and, making sure that my hands are spotless, begin turning the pages. It’s as if everyone’s heart slows and there is nothing beyond these mountains, this meal, no world beyond this one.
I read some of the vignettes: concise, elegant, raw but without lamentation. In one of them John writes about how she informed the pages of his work, and hence his life.
Courage.
Each piece is more beautiful and intense than the last. It’s too intense. I fold the pages, hand them back to Yves with an apology. “It’s too much for me at once,” I tell them both. “It’s so beautiful. I’d like to read it while I’m alone, if I might.”
They understand, and the envelope is carried away.
But like a tide, and as graceful, John begins to churn the heart’s country below. He goes to his room once more and returns with a poem, “Carrying the Songs,” by Moya Cannon, an Irish poet with whom he’s been corresponding. He reads it beautifully, his rich voice deepening to a gentle but powerful baritone. It’s an actor’s voice, Shakespearean—and though there is no brogue, somehow it feels, sounds, Irish.
We all sit quietly. He has cast a trance upon our hearts.
I’m still thinking about the answer I got from him, my treasure. Does he know of the drift in my life, the severance? Has Marc told him? I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he knew things without their ever being spoken.
“You have such a beautiful reading voice,” Erin says, and I love how John is neither self-deprecating nor its close cousin, vain. He just smiles, pleased by her happiness.
He sits back down at the head of the table, clears his throat, dons his reading glasses, adjusts them as might a hunter examining the optics of his scope, thumbs through the pages of one of his books, and then seems to relax, finding what he was searching for. As he reads a passage from Bento’s Sketchbook, about a character named Bento (a diminutive of the philosopher Spinoza’s first name) in a municipal swimming pool, we sit mesmerized and sheltered beneath his voice. I listen to his breath and imagine how it must have been when he joined these words and sentences together, the slow-rolling sound waves that bring the story into us. He finishes and sits back, happy again with our silence, and only now, for the first time, does he look even the least bit fatigued.
He pours more wine for us and then goes back to his room. After we finish it, the rest of us walk outside and climb the wooden ladder to Yves’s painting loft. The ladder goes straight up, vertical rung-and-rail nailed to the side of the barn. We pop into the loft, walk past the hay bales, which glow in the late-afternoon attic light, and across the wide planks to the studio.
When we open the door we are greeted by the smell of paint and a flood of white light, along with an extravagance of easels and canvases, cans of soaking brushes of all sizes and lengths. And the mountain. Always the mountain.
The most famous peak in Europe, the iconic Mont Blanc—the wild soul of Europe, or what’s left of its wild soul. Of course these two men, father and son, would live at its flanks, milking that wildness from it each day and night. Of course their family has settled here as the outside world slips into the future. Mont Blanc fills the huge window. One cannot prepare for opening a door and stepping into a small room in which is housed an entire mountain, much less that mountain.
I worry that I can’t properly describe Yves’s paintings. I don’t have John’s facility for art criticism, after all. If I use the word figures—apparitions—coupled with the adjective abstract, the mind drifts away from rather than toward the subject. The paintings are thickly textured, in hues of smoke—blue, gray, purple, black, eggplant, mauve—and would seem to have nothing to do with Mont Blanc, which, I realize now, is the point. It is Yves’s knowledge of the view when his back is turned to the mountain that lets him go wherever he wants in his painting. The mountain will always be there when he turns around.
His counter space, and every scrap of wall space, are filled with talismans: shells, nests, feathers, bones, stones, and myriad pictures, including photographs of his parents when they were young and brimming with verve. Looking at the pictures of John then—in a sedan outside a restaurant, smoking a cigarette, or on a motorcycle on a county lane in the fall—one understands why he is still as powerful as he is. Such a light can never go completely out.
I imagined that in these journeys I might discover some things even more valuable than the answers for which I had gone searching. What is the nature of greatness? The depth of commitment required to make even the faintest impression upon the implacable stone of history and culture? How ought we to teach, how to learn? How to grow old?
What I had not guessed was that I might come closer to understanding the nature of time itself. I know that my heroes, like everyone else, are mortal. And yet when I am in their presence, time slows. It folds in on itself. They cannot inhabit this stillness forever, of course. Eventually time resumes its plummet. But these elders manage to move through it in a way different from the rest of us.
Marc and Daniel are waiting for us at the bottom of the ladder outside the barn, trying with their European manners to be casual, but letting us know also that the light is going away and now is the time for a group photograph. We step inside to check in with John, who is seated alone at the long table in the dimming light, on the telephone, speaking to someone in that same rich voice with which he spoke to us.
“I am dying,” he says.
It’s chilling to hear the words, but he says them with such pleasantness, almost cheerfulness, that he seems to mean dying in the general sense, in the way we are all dying every day, in the way the light is leaving, or will be soon.
“This is nothing,” he says.
He looks over at us then, standing at the head of the long table, waiting for him, our leader, our host. What little light is left in the room finds its way into his eyes. He concludes his conversation, hangs up, smiles, rises, takes me and Erin by the arm, and together we walk outside to sit on the long bench beside his woodpile for a picture, just one, in the last moment of light.