by Don Wallace
“Oh, yes. But I must talk to Mindy, and…”
“Of course. But still, if you are interested it is almost certainly necessary for you to meet the notary. I have made an appointment for ten tomorrow morning.”
Gwened stared serenely out to sea. I felt as if I had been rudely shaken out of a pleasant dream; now all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. But I couldn’t, despite Donnant’s opaline sands and mother-of-pearl waves. This was, I realized, my cue. Gwened intended to force a decision out of us, yes or no, before I left. She knew me, knew us, too well. If we thought that we could subsist on dreams forever, Gwened was bound and determined to put a stop to it.
As the poet once said, “In dreams begin responsibilities.” We’d had our run of dreams long enough; now it was time to wise up. And just in case I didn’t get the point, as soon as we returned to her house Gwened handed me the phone.
“First—where is it? Behind Gwened’s?” Mindy breathlessly demanded.
“You won’t believe it. It’s right in the middle of the village, on the square, in that row facing the road. I don’t know how we missed it. Gwened says it’s the driest spot in the village; it’s the oldest house standing.”
“What condition is it in?”
“Pretty much of a mess.”
“Of course it is, not being lived in for five years! Is it big?”
Hearing the excitement in her voice, I suddenly wanted to downplay the house’s already modest charms. “Two rooms, that’s all.”
“As big as our apartment? Or smaller?”
I had paced it off. “About twice the size.”
“Then it’s big!”
“Actually, it felt small. Min, it’s just two rooms. No bathroom, no land for a fosse septique.”
“So we go in the fields?”
“Gwened says there’s a new kind of fancy compactor-oven toilet we can get. A lady in Le Palais supposedly has one.”
“God, don’t you just love the French! How about a stove?” We’d both dreamed of inheriting a Breton woodstove, along with a lit clos, a sort of cupboard bed, maybe a pair of hand-carved wood sabots for our feet, along with a few lace curtains, with or without the embroidered peacocks on Gwened’s.
“No stove, not even a sink. There isn’t even running water. The old lady used the well in the square.”
Mindy sighed. “So it’s going to take a lot of work.”
“Min, it’s a ruin.”
“So a total rehab?”
“Gwened and Franck say we’ll definitely have to replace a lot of the floor and ceiling; there’s dry rot.”
“Termites?”
“Franck says no.”
“Well…” While Mindy paused, the faint Babel of the intercontinental airwaves pulsed rhythmically in the background. “You’re there—should we buy it?”
“No fair. It has to be a joint decision.”
“Well, is Kerbordardoué still the same?”
“It hasn’t changed.”
“Then I think we should do it.”
I took a deep breath. I hadn’t felt so on-the-spot since I’d proposed to Mindy, back on the dance floor of a late-night party in Iowa City, the two of us slow dancing, Motown on the box, surrounded by a circle of fellow grad students. Then, I’d had the feeling that when the dance was over, I would’ve missed my chance. The same tingling, flushed feeling attended me now. But I didn’t have Mindy’s face before me, and I was panicking a little.
“Have you looked at the cadastre? Have you checked the zoning for the land around the village? Did you ask about the usages ruraux?”
“I’m seeing the notary tomorrow about all of that.”
“Well.” She sounded out of breath. Suddenly the heavy black phone seemed even heavier. “This will be the first real thing we’ve bought in our marriage. Are we nuts? We don’t even have a car,” she added, laughing.
“I guess it’s about time. I mean, nine years.”
It was getting harder to talk. We listened to each other’s breathing.
“How’s your French?” she asked abruptly.
I shuddered. “Your notebook saved my life.”
“Listen carefully tomorrow. Write down your answers—better yet, have the notary write the answers down in the notebook.”
“Okay, okay… I guess this call is costing Gwened a fortune. I love you.”
“I love you, too. You did good, Young Strudel.”
Young Strudel slumped back in the chair. Young Strudel—Mindy’s nickname for the clumsy, beaming young blond in shorts who was always being mistaken for a German wherever we went in Europe—had a feeling that he was really in for it now.
• • •
After setting down the phone, I went looking for my hostess. Ducking under a bower of willows, I found Gwened weeding her garden. “Looks like we’re going to do it.”
She nodded, lips bent in a slight smile. “I am very happy to hear it. Come, help me pick some of these tiny, delicious carrots for our dinner.”
After we carried the lettuce and vegetables to the kitchen, Gwened asked me if I would come with her to a special place. Leaving her house, we turned away from the village, skirting a field of immature green corn.
“For years I had heard it spoken of,” said Gwened, “but the people here are very shy with strangers. Yes, I am considered a stranger,” she added, “even though my grandfather was born on Belle Île. It’s because I don’t live here full-time. Anyway, one day when I was out in the woods collecting pinecones for the fire—they make such lovely sparks—I chanced to see an old woman walk into the underbrush where there was no path. One minute she was there. The next, she just disappeared. I had to see where she had gone.”
We were in the woods ourselves, under a canopy of dense branches. Norfolk pines, planted in six rows, had grown together to make tunnellike paths. The floor of the forest was completely covered with needles and felt springy underfoot.
“I recognized the woman,” said Gwened. “A few months ago, she appeared in the village. They say she lived all her life on a farm in Ty-Néhué, as a cowherd. She lives in the house at the end of your row, without electricity or water. Perhaps you have seen her. She is a trifle, how do you say it, touched? She does not speak to any of us, only to Madame Morgane, with whom she takes coffee.”
“I think I saw her the other day,” I said. “Staring at our house, actually. She’s dark-haired, wears a blue dress?”
“That’s her. I have since heard more about her, but that’s for another time.” Gwened led the way out of the forest to a barbed wire fence at the edge of the upland. We were looking down into the next vallon, little valley, over from ours. Between us and a narrow road lay wild waves of blackberries and great oceanic shoals of ferns that swirled in the wind, wrapping around the trunks of gale-grayed pines.
Down by the edge of the road, silver-leaved poplars fluttered. It seemed impassable, but Gwened stepped over the barbed wire fence and down into a cut. A steep, muddy path curled under an overhang and twisted through giant ferns, skirting a brushy dome formed from several wind-beaten trees whose branches had grown entwined. We had passed this tangle when Gwened cut back, ducked down, and disappeared into its center. I followed.
We were in a natural alcove, like a nave in a church. The back was a wall of stone, some of it hand-dressed, the rest the gray-black of exposed bedrock. Stunted trees writhed along the outer rim like dancers, their moss-matted arms stylized, hairy freak-outs; and a gnarled tree trunk rose sinuously from the floor of the enclosure to form a leafy, sun-shotgunned ceiling. Rough stone blocks made seats along the wall. Water trickled out of a mossy seam and dripped into a pool scooped out of the rock floor. When I saw that stream burbling from a hidden source, I was done for.
“It is a spring,” Gwened said. “She knew it was here. But it’s more than that. I believe it is a Druid sh
rine. She has been clearing away the brush.”
“The old woman?”
“La Femme Sauvage. That is how she is known.” Gwened took a stone seat. “Nobody knows who the Druids were. All we know is they erected the menhirs, the ten thousand stones at Carnac, the alignments at Stonehenge, but we don’t know why. We do know they regarded springs as sacred. The Bellilois pretend to be as baffled by the stones as anyone, but then you see things, and you wonder. Like the old crosses at Lanno and Herlin. They’re Druid altars over five thousand years old, carved into crosses by the Christians in the fourteenth century. You will never see them without a garland of fresh flowers.” Gwened touched her forehead. “You know, with my own eyes I have seen La Femme Sauvage speaking to your well in the village.”
At Gwened’s suggestion, we sat in silence in the bower. After a while, she pointed across the valley at a dark lip of stone. “That’s the quarry where the slates on your house were quarried seventy years ago. The woman’s name, by the way, is Suzanne,” she added with a knowing smile that hinted at all the mysteries to come—if we bought the ruin.
I nodded, but actually she had me at “It’s a spring.” I grew up in a suburb of Southern California so flat that it was below sea level in places. In fact, Long Beach was actually sinking from all the oil being pumped out from under it. We were told that the constantly nodding grasshopper rig in our schoolyard was pumping sea water back down to keep us all from plunging into a chasm. Far from scaring or scarring us, this lent a touch of B-movie excitement when playing in the vacant lots that were our lizard preserves and dirt-clod battlefields and Jurassic savannahs. The ground could give way at any instant!
By the time I turned twelve, though, the last vacant lot was gone. A tract house occupied its physical space. It was shocking, the mystery force sucking my old landscapes away so swiftly and with the same finality as my mother’s vacuum cleaner hoovering up dust kitties. Through all my years at Sunday school, I’d never felt a grief comparable to what I felt over losing that final plot of windblown wild grasses.
Around the same time that the last vacant lot was transformed into another split-level, I came to church with my pockets bulging with toads, which I hid in the Bible basket when the congregation stood to sing. The physical realm that my mother’s faith dismissed as immaterial suddenly became the focus of everyone’s attention. Out of nowhere appeared a spongy carpet of living creatures, and without quite realizing it, I’d organized the end of organized religion—at least for me.
The strange thing is, though the term seems slightly ridiculous, given my nearsightedness, I was observant in church that day. While everyone was screaming at the ugliness of these creatures who had invaded the House of God, I only saw their amazing vitality.
Leaving our church made little or no difference in my life. Far from seeking out evil influences, at twelve I just preferred to be in nature—not easy in Long Beach. Fortunately my dad was a big Boy Scout (literally, when standing in his adult uniform) and sacrificed many a weekend so Troop 78 could go camping. It was during an expedition the last summer before middle school that I had what I believe to be my first true religious experience.
Ditching my troop in the San Bernardino Mountains, I spent an entire day lying on a log that spanned a grassy hole in a mountain meadow, my face inches above a hidden freshwater spring, watching as it boiled up to the surface. It was the source of the San Jacinto River. Watching the pale, sandy grains sift and swirl from an invisible power, I finally felt an answering tickle within, like a finger in my ribs giving me a little cootchy-coo.
Something similar came over me that day with Gwened at Suzanne’s spring. It still does when I’m in Kerbordardoué. Springs are holy in every culture, and many of the springs on Belle Île are reputed to have special powers. On one of the older maps I’ve come across of the island, from the 1560s, the village is marked by a series of short horizontal lines (indicating a marsh was there at the time), crosshatched by a trio of vertical lines. It looks like musical notation.
The verticals leap from the cartographer’s quill with exuberance and then bend slightly at the top of the stroke, their heavy black beads of ink poised as if to fall. “Puits et Chapelle,” the legend says of these markings, in typical laconic map-speak: “Springs and Chapel.”
“Puits et Chapelle”—it does sound restorative, even miraculous. And our waters are reputed to have properties, although of what kind is in dispute. In the oldest history of the island, Kerbordardoué carries the only description of its kind out of the one hundred fifty-two villages: a terse “said to be the place of the Devil.” Us?
Devilish or not, the miraculous power of the waters of Kerbordardoué and Belle Île were definitely at work on that fateful day—and the next, when we went to see the notary of Le Palais.
• • •
It was a long and curious visit. M. Le Notaire made sure I understood that the house came with no land, that the square was communal, and the lane in front of the house a right-of-way. This was Gwened’s cue to raise the subject of a septic tank. He expressed his regrets that, no, there was no place to put one. Gwened nodded and described, with mounting enthusiasm, the famous electric compactor oven-toilet installed by a most sagacious lady of Le Palais. M. Le Notaire listened, then broke into a torrent. He had heard of it himself!
It worked on the principle of certain high-technology furnaces used to create industrial ceramics for jet engine parts. The way it worked was fascinating: waste was collected in a chamber that, when a button was pressed, was subjected to immense heat, drying out the material and then compressing it into a tiny cake, which was suitable for disposal. Marvelous! What an invention! There was no odor, just a considerable electric bill. He would look forward to seeing ours in action when we had it installed. I nodded.
Since I had Mindy’s go-ahead, all that was left for me to do was sign a single sheet of paper, sort of a preliminary foreclosure on every dime in our name. Then it was back to the village for another spartan lunch with Gwened. (By now my stomach had ceased growling and was making whimpering noises.) And if I was hoping for a drink in celebration, as certainly seemed earned, I was out of luck.
As I would be leaving early the next morning on the boat, Gwened suggested a farewell walk down to the beach. We retraced the familiar path, now my path, our path. We climbed the tall sand dune and found our respective foxholes overlooking the clamorous sea.
“As you may have noticed, I’m looking into my life,” Gwened said after we were settled and had watched the sun slowly setting over foaming ranks of breakers. It was hypnotic and calming, and for the moment I’d gotten over my cold feet. “This year, I’ve had to make a big change. I just did not feel that I could go on living as a sort of idealized image of what others wanted me to be. France is a hard place to be a woman.”
I said that I’d had the thought myself, on occasion—not that I was a woman, of course. But I’d noticed that she carried quite a load, managing her household, teaching at the college, being a mother, a wife…
“My husband has a mistress,” she interrupted.
“Oh.”
“When I confronted him, he wouldn’t give her up. I have taken an apartment in Tours. For my settlement, I asked for the house here.”
Her husband, the kindly choir-singing accountant with the neat beard and the brace of grouse he’d shot aging from the porch rafters and the wine cellar of which he was so proud—this man, to my mind a model gentleman, fully engaged in matters of the spirit, of tradition, of community, of ancient ritual—was also a typical cheating Frenchman? It was so sad. And poor Gwened. What a jerk, I thought.
I murmured my condolences. She nodded, staring out to sea, sitting in her purple-striped caftan, with her new short hair, which dimly reminded me of something I’d read: that women get their hair cut short when they’re starting an affair. Probably in an article in one of Gwened’s ageless Elle magazines stacked by th
e toilet.
“There is another thing,” she said. “I have received a big diagnosis.”
A big diagnosis? She hugged her caftan around her, face glowing in the rays of the last of the sunset, a light so strong and slant it turned the sand and the wind-flattened grasses gold. “It is cancer. In the breast. Quite serious. I do not have long to live, I’m afraid. It will be very hard on my son. Poor Daniel.”
Suddenly our conversation in the car made sense. But then… Wait a minute. What about us? Thinking this, I was aware of how rotten it sounded, even unspoken. But at the moment I felt I must be honest—brutally honest, even if only with myself—since nobody else had been.
So they all knew: Gwened, Franck, Ines, the notary… They had to have been in on it. A little village con game. They’d just hoodwinked the American couple into taking a dog of a house off their hands.
Come on. Calm down. You know your problem: too little faith in people. It’s the curse of the writer, the journalist, the person who’s seen a little too much of humanity up close. It’s important not to make things worse; that won’t help.
Okay, okay… But it’s hard, man, hard.
I sat in my foxhole and stared into the sun until spots floated across my eyelids, even when they were closed. And to give Gwened credit, she knew when to keep quiet.
Of course she had to be aware that I was wondering when and how much to tell Mindy.
“Honey? I know we’ve just bought this ruined house on the say-so of Gwened, sort of on the implied promise of joining our life to hers, in a way. Well, turns out there’s a problem; a couple of problems, actually. First, the house is in worse shape than everyone let on, so we’re going to be spending all the money we have and even more that we don’t have. Second—on top of everything else—she’s dying. Gwened is. Yes, dying. I know, now she tells me. Oh, and I know it’s crazy, but I almost forgot something else. She’s getting divorced, too.”
