by Don Wallace
“Actually, Celeste, we did get a plumber to come.”
“On a Sunday? Never! Laurent? But you are surfers, and he is your friend. That explains it.”
“Non, non, Celeste… You see, Benedict really is a plumber. With a Porsche.”
Silence.
“A plumber with a Porsche,” said Henry at last. “This makes perfect sense. Psychiatrists cannot afford Porsches.”
Henry and I cleaned up the tables and stacked the dirty dishes next to the sink where Celeste and Mindy were doing the wash and dry. When all was done and the tables sponged clean, shining for the morning fast approaching, and the giant black garbage bags stacked by the door, we sat down to a knuckle of Scotch.
“La Fontaine Wallace?” asked Celeste, never one to leave a thread unexplored.
“That’s what Benedict called our exploding toilet,” Mindy said.
“But of course,” said Henry. “Everything makes sense now.”
“It does?” we asked.
“Yes, of course,” said Celeste, twinkling.
“You’re not telling us something!” Mindy exclaimed.
“This is true,” said Celeste.
“It would spoil things.” Henry made a sad clown face. “Anyway, the village needs a mystery. Kerbordardoué has nothing right now, no great curiosities.”
“Except the flowers,” said Celeste.
“Except the flowers,” echoed Henry.
Celeste smiled. “And now, La Fontaine Wallace.”
Mindy and I scratched our heads. We still didn’t get the joke.
• • •
In the morning, when I couldn’t stand not knowing any longer, I strolled down to the Vicomte’s with my coffee and joined the old hero, his wife, and their sons and girlfriends in sitting along the slate-topped stoop in the sunshine. We discussed our apéro and the apéro of Gwened and the satisfaction of seeing the mysterious Midnight Porsche parked in our own village square. Le Vic heard my faltering question and dispatched one of his sons inside the house for a book. It was one of the old-fashioned kind, with bound color plates for the architectural connoisseur. Le Vic flipped a few pages, a few more. “Et voilà.”
I leafed through page upon page of the familiar, elegant cast-iron public water fountains of Paris, designed, the captions said, by someone named Sir Richard Wallace and given by him to the people of the city after the German siege of 1871, so that the poor might have a supply of clean water. For this, Sir Richard was rightly revered.
There it was, mystery explained. At least our glorious fountain had a distinguished pedigree.
“Are you related, Don?” asked the Vicomte’s wife, Yvonne.
I was tempted. Here was a harmless way to claim a little reflected glory in my adopted country. And how could I be sure it wasn’t true? But Mindy is always scolding me about my tendency to overembroider, especially in France, so I shook my head. No.
“Didn’t think so,” said Le Vicomte gruffly in French. “He was a bastard son of the Marquess of Hertford, I believe. A great collector, the Marquess. Never acknowledged his son, but the boy inherited the whole pile, just not the title. Gave all those fountains to the city. Didn’t leave Paris during the Siege. Founded that museum in England.”
“Don’t be too sad, Don,” said Le Vic’s son, Thierry. “We won’t tell anybody.”
“Yes,” said Yvonne, “we are proud to have had our very own Fontaine Wallace here in Kerbordardoué.”
“Even if for only a day,” said Thierry, puffing a smoke ring into the blue sky.
“C’est vite, la gloire,” said Le Vic.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Trop Beau
Beau temps means beautiful weather but also beautiful time.
What I love is how beau temps comes out of nowhere and catches you unaware. You pause while scrubbing a scorched pot in the sink. What’s that sound? And you realize: it’s nothing. The purest nothing that there is.
Later that morning, you hear crystal voices tinkling in your ear. Who’s talking? Where are they? You can’t see anyone. Perhaps you’re imagining things. Anyway, you keep on and turn down the vallon. The light suffuses everything. The air grows humid, and the sunbeams glint off spiderwebs like gold thread.
That afternoon, leaving a gummy fish dish to soak in the sink, you walk—same old, gray scrubber in hand—to the open door. You feel drawn to step outside onto the single flagstone, mossy at the edges, the ground moist as a spring from the lilies Suzanne planted there. The entire village slumps into the most profound silence. Even the swallows are asleep.
This is it, you think. Listen.
Down the lane comes the movie actress, humming. She has changed over the last couple of years. No longer a starlet, she holds her young daughter’s hand like any other mother. She is famous for her provocative roles, for showing some skin and a lot of décolletage, but her choices lately also delve deeper. Although a bit of a media frenzy attended her divorce from her husband, a famous movie director, Luc Besson, here she walks without self-consciousness or fear of paparazzi.
We smile at each other. We will never mention that day at the beach, when for all of five minutes she lay on her towel next to me and asked me to help her with her English. Ah, the memories… She strolls on, scatting a snatch of some pop song with her daughter.
And this, too, is beau temps.
But not everyone is on vacation, not everyone is at the beach, not everyone is singing, because some people have to work. And you tend to feel sad and a little guilty when you see them, say, across a freshly threshed field. You can barely pick out the solitary old tractor and its disker, paused on the edge of a ravine that overlooks the sea.
But then you remember that beau temps is for tractors, too. There was that time you surprised a boy and a girl in the cab, going for a slow cruise, clutch in, tractor shuddering, while they stopped for a kiss. Once you passed a young man and a woman, still in the first flush of marriage, sharing the single seat, feet on the fender, opening their brown bag lunches. Several times you’ve come across a crusty old farmer of Kerhuel who has whisked his bride of forty years away from the village for a September adventure, a tractor ride to the outermost limits of their land to pick blackberries from the brambles that line the ravine.
It’s all beau temps, and it’s all good.
But it’s fleeting. Nobody with a head on his shoulders wastes beau temps. As Madame Morgane likes to say: “Profitez.” One must profit.
This kind of profit means enjoy. It has nothing to do with money, and yet, at its root, yes, there is a financial calculation. As in: forget about the money, honey, and profité.
• • •
We wake early and dash to the market in Le Palais, hoping to beat the August heat and tourist crowds. We go first to buy palourdes before they run out, greeting Shra-Shra and Mumbles, as we’ve nicknamed the swaying, bewhiskered duo whose words never quite make it out of their wild moustaches. All that emerges are alcoholic fumes, enough to knock you down. So hammered are they at eight a.m. that they can barely count out clams, let alone change.
Then we hit the Bellilois corner of the fish market to check out lotte and bar, striped sea bass, and say hello to the tall, striking blond in the yellow full-length rain slicker who cleans your sardines while standing on a box. She’s the best-ever advertisement for a sardine, but she does have a rival: the tall Danish blond who sells the sea bass her husband catches. What a knockout! She, too, cleans and also scales. Both women are elegant and poised, a little salty in conversation and always with a sharp, wet knife in hand. They flip purple fish intestines over their shoulders to the low-flying seagulls behind them with all the insouciance of a bride tossing a bouquet.
After that, I slip away to solo with the goat-cheese queen, who guides me through my halting French. Mindy discreetly withdraws from these tête-à-têtes. I have made it clear that m
y relationship with the goat-cheese queen and her wares is not open for discussion. Mindy is especially not to read anything into the fact that my lady friend’s round cylindrical cheeses, so fresh they quiver, bear a label that reads “Chevre Amouroux Belle Île.” That horny goat looking out from the label with such a stern expression is sending you a message, Mindy. Butt out.
• • •
Back by 9:30, we load up the car for the day’s first surf run. A swell is running, so we ignore the aching muscles and the twitching calves, the sinus pain and the sun-fried skin that feels like pork cracklins. No time to lose.
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves, as we have during every summer when the surf is good. Profitez! We’re still superstitious—we remember the first eight years when, even when it was hot and calm back in the village, the beach wind blew cold and the sea was gray and choppy. It has now been eight years of fine weather and good surf; we suspect that the day we don’t respond to the call, the waves will die and not come back.
It can oddly feel like work. We even joke that the ocean is our office. One day a couple of summers back, we realized that there’d been ten straight days of surf. Our heads were rolling around on our shoulders. Ten days of surf doesn’t mean an hour or two of surfing a day; on Belle Île, with its Nordic light that goes on until ten at night, it can mean two daily sorties that last from two to three hours each, sandwiched around a nap and meal break.
Of course no normal mortal can withstand that pace. It takes true dedication to do that. But as soon as we arrive, in the beginning of our month, we are working our way into shape. Rolling out of bed in the blue morning, fueling on coffee, fried eggs, and baguettes buttered and slathered with blackberry preserves that Mindy makes in our first week.
After an hour of writing, we roust the boys. (In addition to Devo, there is usually at least one of Rory’s American friends visiting while his parents scoot footloose and fancy-free all over France.) While Mindy is yelling at them to get their suits and towels off the line, I pull the battered old Renault up and yank the parking brake. Now the boards come out, to be snugged into the roof rack and lashed down. With the three heavy boards on top of the Renault, a strong gust of wind will raise the car’s front wheels off the road like a rearing stallion.
The parking lot is at the bottom of a vallon, with a tall grassy sandhill to the left and thirty-foot sand dunes directly in front. We load up and trudge across a wooden bridge over a stream, between green rushes and cattails, then follow a narrow path through the dunes. We emerge overlooking the bay. Though golden and already warm, the beach is almost completely deserted. God bless the French and their rigid social protocols: the lunch hour must be properly observed. They won’t arrive until after.
Not so the surfers. There are already a couple in the water and a few perched on their bicycles or mopeds, checking things out from up on the cliff. There are those who call themselves surfers but prefer to watch. Not us.
Time to grit the teeth and pull on the black rubber, our wet suits still damp from the evening before. Then, with groans and shrieks, we pile into the white water and begin to paddle-battle out to the third break, where the ocean meets the bay. Ten minutes later, we’re there, breathing hard—eyeing the horizon and each other, jockeying for position, one big happy family turned happy rivals.
• • •
At noon we’re back at the house. “Food!” shouts Rory, throwing himself on the fauteuil and reaching for the nearest chess book. Devo growls, head buried deep in the refrigerator.
While Mindy soaks in the tub to warm up, I make salami-tomato-butter baguette sandwiches. Yesterday we had pan bagnat, soppy tuna-and-hard-boiled-egg salad spooned with plenty of capers and sliced tomatoes into puffy round rolls.
At the same time I collect rations for the picnic to come: chocolate and apples, biscuits and a thermos of hot Earl Grey go into the straw basket we’ll bring back for Round 2 at the beach. Pausing at the bookshelf, I decide to grab a novel from the stack that we mailed to ourselves once the house was complete. I had sent fifty pounds of books three months in advance—by ship, in a dingy USPS canvas bag—for just twenty-five dollars.
I dawdle over the titles: Poe, Melville, Proust, Anthony Powell… Or perhaps a thriller is in order? We have Alan Furst, Chandler and Hammett, John le Carŕe, and Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy. Then there are those books that I return to and reread every summer. Which shall it be: The Name of a Bullfighter by Luis Sepúlveda, Andrei Platonov’s Fierce and Beautiful World, or Some Clouds by Paco Ignacio Taibo II?
It turns out to be an unopened Times Literary Supplement, still wrapped in plastic, from years ago. The very definition of exploration—diving into a time capsule of late-1990s British high culture. For me, ’tis jaunty, arcane, and absurd. Like our summer days.
After lunch, there is a pretense of reading. Soon everyone stretched out is snoring.
At one forty-five Mindy groans and shoves herself up on one arm. “Coffee?” Less than half of the day has passed, with hours to go before we sleep again. Time for a little writing, then back we’ll go to our office on the sands.
Profitez.
• • •
After lunch, everybody goes to the beach. Young and old, Parisian and farmer. I’ve never seen farmers at the beach anywhere else in the world. But in Belle Île, the flocks of sheep are sometimes driven across the beach at Donnant at low tide. Sheep at the beach: just when you thought you’d seen everything.
Even the lifeguards don’t show up until one p.m. With heavy-lidded eyes, they raise a flag to indicate the danger level: today is jaune, yellow—caution for everyone but us. They set up a board on which they write the day’s météo, weather. Today there is a small ceremony: the water temperature has soared to 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit). Temperatures we’d think twice about before going in anywhere outside Belle Île feel positively balmy here.
Villages re-form on the sand in circles of towels. Look, there’s Kerledan—shall we visit? I think I see Goelan. Oh god, don’t look at Kervilahouen—we owe them a drink.
Some days I roll over and see Gwened and her new husband lying back toward the dunes. They like it just far enough away to not belong to any crowd, except to us who know her. She gives a little wave. Her man sucks in his stomach and carefully adjusts his floppy sun hat.
The dunes are where our surfboards line up like a multicolored picket fence. The boards’ noses are hung with full wet suits, black Neoprene tops and bottoms, and towels drying. Rolling at the base of the dunes are fully clothed amorous teenagers. Next to them are motorcyclists, slowly peeling off their leathers and helmets to reveal chalk-white skin and platinum-dyed buzz cuts. Next to them the en bonne forme family lies primly, legs and arms straight, on their crisp blue-striped towels. And on and on.
Here comes a long line of clean-cut adolescents in uniforms: khaki shorts, light blue shirts, bandanas tied at the neck, cute little hats. Boys and girls from a timeless virginal grove, they make their way down the burning sands, threading between glistening, oily, uniformly topless bodies lying as if in state. Scouts? Sea Scouts? Oh, really?
They’re chatting in German. Their scoutmaster is short, roly-poly, and unshaven, but his uniform has much impressive braid and many medals. When they reach the wet, packed sand at the high-tide line, he blows a whistle. Mädchen und junge Männer turn south and march off toward Bangor, the round guy bringing up the rear, fanny pack bouncing.
We shake our heads and smile. What can we say? A French beach in summer is reliable entertainment.
• • •
A couple of little goat paths trickle down the cliff face like the tracks of tears. Down them now, tiptoeing, hesitant, come families from the north end of the island. Then a new band tops the rise, each carrying a surfboard under one arm and a beach bag in the other hand: the Kings of Donnant, our surf crew in full complement. They plunge down the cliff, sliding but sure-fo
oted, their families following, letting gravity speed them along.
As they set up camp at the far end, we exchange waves. We may go see them in a few minutes, after they’re settled; they probably won’t come here. The Bellilois give Parisians a wide berth socially. I stand up and tug on my shortie wet suit, a concession to age after ten years of going without. I turn to Madame. “Coming?”
Mindy sits up, stares down the beach. She’s waiting on the Kings. “They’ll know when it’s good,” she says.
The gang is looking over at us as she looks at them. They rise from their towels and reach for their wet suits. Who knows if they think it’s time, or if they just saw me getting ready and thought Mindy would be coming, too. Whatever, the Kings of Donnant are going out: Theophile, our mâitre d’bâtiment; Andre, the recently retired naval marine and his wife, Coco, who runs the spa at our one elite hotel; Yannick, the moody chain-smoking Sartre of Sauzon. The six of us have been surfing together forever, it seems, along with their friends Alain, Guy, and Roger. Mindy and I are twenty years older but it doesn’t feel like it—the Kings’ gift to us, and one we pretend not to notice.
All over Brittany a hybrid Breizh-Malibu surf culture has emerged, hardy and clear-eyed. There’s even a Breton style of beachwear: think plaids and Celtic crosses. Thanks to the Kings, who represent the first generation of island surfers, Belle Île occupies a special place with an Endless Summer vibe.
Our local friends already led oceangoing lives, men and women both taking a few hours every week to go fishing in a guano-spattered skiff, spearfishing in the fjords, pole-fishing from the cliffs (during savage storms: the best time for striped bass), gathering mussels and pousse-pieds. Surfing fit right in, the missing piece. If we’ve had a hand in this—and we do occasionally claim bragging rights for introducing it on Belle Île—then let that be our legacy.
But, sad to say, surfing does tend to alarm our Paris friends. “You mean you fly 8,000 kilometers to France for thees?”
