by Gregory Day
Lacombe’s fascination with the area was clear. He had been visiting Arcachon for many years and in the front seat he now began to describe Brémontier’s adaptation of local techniques whereby a mix of gorse and broom were planted with the resinous Pinus pinaster so that the slower-growing pines were protected in their early stages. Once the broom reached its limit at two metres, the pines, from their well-protected beginnings, began to shoot clear and to not only transform the marsh but bar the ocean by settling the sand into ever-rising foredunes. This work was aided by the erection of palisades, or slat fences, and also by the laying of brushwood over sand that had, crucially, been stabilised by the planting of gourbet, or marram grass. The mat-like root system of marram grass spread through the dunes like a powerful glue to hold them in place. Then, when under Napoleon III it was discovered that a bed of brown limestone fifty metres under the surface further restricted the drainage of the area, François Chambrelent, a successor of Brémontier, devised a drainage system of trenches, collection pools and the inclusion of cork and holm oak along with the pine. To demonstrate his techniques, Chambrelent had personally bought five hundred acres of sodden moor in les landes which he proceeded to transform. His achievement concluded what amounted to an epic engineering project which eventually saw the area become one of the richest in all of France.
Mathilde listened to the professor as they drove, occasionally correcting him on a village name or geographical misnomer. He was, after all, talking of the landscape where she had grown up and where her father’s family had lived for centuries. Her family still lived, in fact, on the boundary of a remnant patch of salt pasture, or prés salés, at the oyster port of La Teste-de-Buch near Arcachon. It was from that squelchy ground that she had launched her pinasse as a girl. Lacombe was keen to question Mathilde about her family’s history, most particularly when she mentioned that they still had her great-great-grandfather’s marsh-walking stilts under the staircase of an old mill behind their house. FB noted how excited Lacombe was about that but he also noted how the professor’s interest and enthusiasm seemed to alternately please and annoy Mathilde as they drove along.
By lunchtime they were in the small village of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, where an old friend whom Lacombe had fought alongside during the war lived in a large house by the river. As Lacombe and his friend, a slim and cordial man named Louis Poirier, took their prearranged lunch in the house, FB and Mathilde bought fruit from the village and walked the sandy riverbank, discussing what Lacombe had been telling them.
An hour later they were on the road again, with Mathilde reading aloud from a newspaper Lacombe’s friend had given them. She recited a list from the local paper which attempted to convey, rather than to summarise, the range of people who had been on the streets in Paris:
Railwaymen, postmen, printers, metro personnel, metal workers, airport workers, market men, electricians, lawyers, sewer men, bank employees, building workers, glass and chemical workers, waiters, municipal employees, painters and decorators, gas workers, shop girls, insurance clerks, road sweepers, film studio operators, busmen, teachers, workers from the new plastic industries . . .
As she read the list her voice modulated between excitement, pride and a melancholy brought about by her own non-participation. FB immediately brought up her involvement in the Night of the Barricades in an attempt to make her feel better. But Mathilde only smiled wanly, ignoring the too-obvious encouragement by retorting: ‘It’s a long list, but it doesn’t mention civil engineers from Australia.’
†
Later that day, as the light began to slant west over the land of Poitiers-Charentes around Chevanceaux in the pre-dusk, they heard reports on the car radio of a strike at the Sud Aviation factory in Nantes. Mathilde leant in towards the dash, turning up the volume and glancing excitedly over at Lacombe behind the wheel. The news was significant, as it confirmed the possibility that what had happened in Paris could spread across the entire country. Nantes had always seemed to nourish the workers’ voice; the workforce at Sud Aviation was heavily unionised, and it was no surprise therefore that it was in the vanguard of regional reactions. In the preceding months and years there had been lockouts of staff by management, redundancies, and much agitation within the intense factions of the unionised left. There had been a twenty-four-hour strike as recently as April, and in February, when earlier student demonstrations had been violently repressed by the police on behalf of the government, strong links had been established between workers and students. Repeated work stoppages had been planned by the workers at Sud Aviation, and the Force Ouvrière faction of the unions there had been pressing for another ‘total strike’. Thus, when the repression and conflict exploded in Paris it was almost a fait accompli that Nantes would follow.
But what of the rest of the country, where, after all, conditions could not be so different? As they drove along discussing the likely scenarios, Mathilde assured Lacombe and FB that her father would know what was likely to happen, and where. Once they had passed south of Bordeaux and arrived at the coast at La Teste-de-Buch, he would no doubt update them thoroughly.
She was excited by the prospect of seeing her father, FB could see that, excited also by the sense of vindication she felt sure her father would be receiving from the events. And this was where FB felt both helplessly in love and hopelessly out of his depth. Although she was younger than he, Mathilde was no fool, and there was no escaping the fact that FB was far from politicised. But he was increasingly attracted to the worldview Mathilde had been brought up on, whereby the ordinary human of everyday life was continually cannibalised by those who had no more meaning in their life than an obsession with power. The truth was a bifurcated thing: on one hand it was in the urgent eyes of the Algerian who had thrust the leaflets into his hands near the bridge at Boulogne-Billancourt; on the other hand it lay in a far more inscrutable reality to be found in the slowness and stillness of dunes, whether they be real or painted.
He already understood that this bifurcation was the very territory where the connection between himself and Mathilde lay. In Paris she had helped assemble the barricades, shielding her eyes from the tear gas and hurling whatever she could find at the perspex shields of the CRS. She had done this all night long and was as strident in the dawn as she had been before the unknown horizons of midnight. But then she had faltered. Or deepened, depending on how you looked at it. She was fighting against the depth and he was part of that struggle. She had made her way to the gallery, she had held him and let herself be held. She had agreed to forgo the dramatic public moment in favour of the relative quiet of the south in order to travel with him and the professor back to the homeland of her upbringing. But even so it was all still up in the air, all in jeopardy still, nothing was resolved. FB’s skin was tingling permanently as a result. Everything felt both electric and ambiguous. He was approaching a coast unknown to him, where his professor and Mathilde would, in different ways, be the experts. He would be the apprentice, both in his studies and in love, and as he looked out the rear window of Lacombe’s car and caught sight of the Pinus pinaster for the first time, it occurred to him that he had waited his whole lifetime for what he was about to learn.
†
Mathilde had been irritable as they’d bypassed Bordeaux but she grew calm and silent as they cruised down the motorway onto les landes and approached La Teste-de-Buch. She began to point out things in the landscape, turning towards the back seat to show them – to show them off – to FB rather than to Professor Lacombe. Now that they had entered a space wherein the sky seemed higher, vaster, she may have assumed that the Australian would relate. He, not the Professor of Sand from the University of Paris, would have the eyes to see. Perhaps she looked at the landscape now with something of those imagined eyes herself, as well as her local knowledge, and as FB responded enthusiastically in the back seat (he did note in his journal that finally, after many weeks in the congestion of Paris, he felt he could see
and breathe) the rapport between them would surely have been palpable to Lacombe. This was a young woman showing her beloved the things she loved the most: the remnant russet swamps between the planted pines, the roadside oyster stalls – and they still hadn’t even made it to the coast proper. FB also noted that, for the first time on the journey, ‘Lacombe must have had the annoying sense of being a chaperon’. FB wondered, too, as they drove through the small town of Marcheprime, whether the professor might even forbid Mathilde from accompanying Francis on their field research upon the dune.
†
The hotel the professor liked to stay at in Arcachon was the Loup Garou, in the Ville d’Hiver, or winter village. This was on the hill above Arcachon, some distance from the salt pastures and oyster beds of La Teste-du-Buch, and so Lacombe took a detour to drop Mathilde and Francis at Mathilde’s family home before continuing on his own in the car to the Hotel Loup Garou.
Thus, on the casual footpath of the coastal town, the two students stood briefly with their bags, alone and nervous, both feeling like adolescents again.
They were surrounded by a burgeoning suburb ringed by empty salt fields. Close by and in the distance boats were marooned in the mud by the notoriously low tide of the fishing port. Immediately before them stood a low, modest Basque-inflected house amongst pine trees, a house with whitewashed walls and with a low whitewashed concrete fence separating it from the road. Behind the house was a sky so softly blue it surprised FB to find it by the ocean.
Mathilde told FB how strange she felt to be home. She knew her father would be excited to engage with a visitor from Australia but knew also that he would be disappointed that she had left behind the momentousness of Paris. On the other hand, her mother would be glad that she was out of harm’s way, knowing as she did that no revolution ever succeeded without bloodshed, injustice and brutality. Mathilde warned FB that when it came to the issue of him her mother would be nonplussed, interiorised, shy.
They had raised her safe in La Teste-de-Buch, amongst the sea lanes and oyster beds. La Teste and the entire locale of the bassin had a strong patois, a deep identity, but it depended in its laconic, phlegmatic attitudes on the fact that whatever cultural mask it wore was constantly being adjusted by the direct immensities of nature. Thus, it would accommodate certain inflections, immersions, tones, only to have them suddenly divested, exposed or stripped back, always and every day. For those who had been around Arcachon for more than a few generations, any external scheme to develop the port, any grand external show of certainty or egoist aspiration was met with resignation, humour or outright derision. All of which made sense to Mathilde’s mother, whose volatile childhood in Algiers had stayed with her like a rocky ballast, stabilising her in the truth of conflict, its dangers and perpetuities, and therefore allowing her to maintain solid coordinates even amongst the loomings and changeability of the Gascony tides.
For his part, FB was positively fizzing there in front of the Soubret house. Lacombe had begrudgingly agreed that FB could save on accommodation costs by staying in the old moulin, or mill, behind Mathilde’s parents’ house, but FB felt a degree of truancy in relation to his separation from the professor nevertheless. When Mathilde smiled, took his hand and leant in to kiss his cheek before they entered the house, he was also concerned that her parents would see them. If they were outside his family house on Milipi Avenue, such affection would have been unthinkable. The sharp austerity of his home, where open affection was always uncomfortable, would have made sure of that. But here he was reminded that such displays were not embarrassing or criminal. They were, in fact, the point of it all. Even the weather, in this case so easily blue and white and clear, seemed to FB at that moment to be a space coaxed into existence by romance.
†
Beyond the southern whitewash of the facade and front fence FB found the interior of the house warm with polished wood and comfortable furniture. And books. More books than he had ever seen inside a family home. They lined the airy tiled hallway leading from the entrance into the core of the dwelling; every glimpse he had into the rooms they passed along the way seemed also to be filled with books; and in the living area itself, with its low ceiling of exposed pine, the largely white paper spines were again the feature.
This was not what he had expected, nor was the imposing figure of Alain Soubret as he met them at the door. Mathilde’s father was an unusually tall man, easily taller than the six-foot Australian, with a strikingly gaunt face. His black hair was swept back from his high forehead and to the side, his eyes were a sharp blue and his body still firm, young-seeming, though thin. Surprised as Alain Soubret was to find his daughter on the doorstep, he quickly subsumed his disorientation, his disappointment even, into the warmth and affection of fatherly love. And with that fatherly love came a warm welcome of his daughter’s guest.
After coffee in the kitchen at a dark round table shaded by a large fig tree outside the window, and a conversation which touched briefly on the state of play in Paris, and also in Nantes and Lyon, but much more on the purpose of Francis’s visit, Mathilde suggested to her father that she show FB out to the moulin in the garden.
Alain Soubret agreed, telling FB that the mill would not only be comfortable but a quiet place in which to write up his notes after his field trips to the dune. ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said, ‘and then later you can come back in and dine with us. Mathilde’s mother will be back by then, and we can get to know you a little.’
At which point Mathilde hugged her father, kissed him on the cheek and, smiling, made for the double doors to the garden to lead FB to the mill.
If a life’s significant moments are ground down from the ephemerality of time acting upon the materiality of space – wind on rock, liquid tide on cliff and shore – until a grain of memory is formed, then one such grain was about to take shape in FB’s life. It would not exist in isolation, of course – already the day had become indelibly heaped with significance – but just as one jagged edge of quartz can catch the light where the equally gregarious grains around it cannot, so it was that a momentous day was about to receive the glinting centrepiece around which the infinite grain-moments of its duration would gather and form.
By now it was four o’clock in the afternoon. She took his hand (his brown suitcase was in his other) and led him through tumbling green, a garden rumpled and hirsute, with as many fronds and leaves and tendrils as there were books inside the house. Many more, in fact. The sun had reddened some forms and merely brought more of the green out in others. Through it all ran a hand-mown path, at the end of which FB could glimpse a circular building whose buckled circular stone walls seemed in keeping with the tumblings of the garden itself. After the long motorway south, everything seemed suddenly rounded and strewn, quite the opposite to the effect achieved in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where FB had wandered like a solitary in the first hours and days after his arrival. The Soubret garden felt to him like something unintentional, evolutionary. His brief journey through the book-filled house, from front door to back via the hallway and conversations in the dark cave-like kitchen, had been tense and polite, but now the Atlantic sky reclined behind the irregular column of the vertical stone-and-daub moulin as if content with his progress. Mathilde’s father did not follow, and her mother was out collecting shellfish at the shore. They were alone.
†
For the young Francis Herschell the mill became immediately a double interior. On approach it seemed a relic whose engineering vernacular momentarily fascinated him. Most likely built from local stone, it was roughly daubed, irregular, but certainly round. The tints of the stones were dark and variegated against the lighter slurry of the daub, giving the effect of coarse gems set in ascending patterns of white earth. But once he and Mathilde had entered under the dark and slightly askew lintel, through a narrow timbered entrance into a rustic kitchen with a wood stove and white, roughly plastered stone-cut walls, he felt the exc
itement of having entered into the living space of another distinct culture. Hence the doubling effect: alone with Mathilde he had also entered into the historical privacy of la France profonde.
On the left there was a spiral staircase leading up out of the kitchen to a sitting room above, and then winding even higher again to a bedroom on a third level. Francis’s eyes immediately fell on the possibility of the bottom step. Well, he would have to be sleeping up there, he presumed, for the tiny kitchen and a bathroom at the back took up the whole ground floor of the structure. He became aware of the erection growing in his pants. In fact, it was not so much growing as instant. He could smell Mathilde standing beside him and sensed the weight and flex of her body. ‘My grand-père restored this building,’ she told FB. ‘It was long ago a working mill for grain, but in the end he lived in here as an old man when my father returned home with my mother. I remember him at the stove here when I was a young girl. And at this table. He liked to play chess and to garden and cook. He made wine also. He died in his sleep in the bed upstairs.’
‘Was he political?’ FB asked.
‘Like my father? No. But he had a local mind and grew annoyed by the pace of change. At times this annoyance was in sympathy with my father’s interests, at other times they were opposed. But no, his interests lay elsewhere, though naturally he was active in the resistance after Hitler invaded.’
They were standing by the round table in front of the stove. She smiled. ‘I think that he would not disagree with what has happened these last few days,’ she said. ‘Though I’d have to ask my papa. Perhaps at the very least he would have liked sous les pavés, la plage. He would have joked about how long it has taken everyone to realise that. He might also have added, sous l’eau se trouvent les huîtres. Under the water lies the oysters.’
†
FB’s brown suitcase stayed downstairs, alone on the equally brown patina of the painted stone floor of the mill’s kitchen. The two of them ascended.
