The Lantern

by Deborah Lawrenson

  Here in the Luberon, where around thirty of them are regular visitors, a softer wind from north-northwest is called a biset, a little kiss, but the might of a cold north wind is l’air noir, or bise noire, black air, black kiss. It is violent and chill, like a storm in the depths of a winter’s night without a moon.

  A northeasterly is l’orsure, or le vent de l’ours, the wind of the bear—which, they say, is the wind of melancholy poets, artists, and dreamers. The north-northwesterlies are the vents de farine, the winds that grind the millers’ flour. The kindly vent roux, the russet winds, are east-southeasterly, close in spirit to the North African sirocco, bringing warm, dry breezes ridden by pollinating insects and rusty Arabian dust.

  During autumn and winter, when the worst winds howled, the summer lived on in the red and orange and green of the fruit and vegetables pressed into glass jars and sealed. As the temperature dropped, olive oil went cloudy in the bottle.

  Once, when I was still too young to dispute the facts, Pierre warned me that the eerie white shapes held in the oil were imprisoned spirits.

  “Like ghosts?” I asked.

  “Bad ghosts.”

  “Will they escape?”

  “They might,” said Pierre.

  “If they do, what will we do? Will they catch us if we run?”

  “We will be pinned to the ground, unable to move, while they do terrible things.”

  “Like what?”

  While I stared in wide-eyed horror, he went over to the glass jar with a devilish look on his face, which made his chin look more pointed than ever. He made to drop the jar on the floor.

  “Don’t! Don’t!” I begged him.

  He gave one more unsettling laugh, but then slowly replaced the jar on the shelf. He would have gone through with his threat, I was sure, but for the rattle at the back door that announced our father’s return from the fields.

  Change is not always visible, as the turn of the seasons is, or the natural process of aging. We are so many different people in one lifetime. But even now I think Marthe can sense my thoughts, would feel the rough textures of my indecision under her fingers, and taste my failings as easily as she could smell the changing seasons.

  As for Pierre: what disturbance occurred inside his head, under his skin, so early in his life? I never understood him.

  Why had he come back now? To laugh at me and mock my efforts? Why couldn’t it have been gentle Maman, or Marthe, or, best of all, Mémé Clémentine? A grandmother would have been in the natural order. I might have welcomed her return, given a choice of phantoms. Hers would have been a watchful presence by the hearth, by the entrance to the wine cave maybe, or in the quiet spot in the orchard or the kitchen garden.

  I still grow my own food. I eat vegetables mainly, and fast-growing chickpeas, that peasant standby. I keep as fit as possible, though my joints are not as flexible as they once were. When I wring out the washing, and try to pinch the pegs to hang it out, my fingers take longer than they should to grip. I’ve noticed that after a few hours in the vegetable patch, soil gets stuck in the deep grooves of my hands. Such a lot of scrubbing it takes to get out, and when that’s done, the things are red and bent like claws. It creeps up gradually, old age, all the more insulting when you were convinced it was a state that would never happen to you.

  How much more I understand now, though! I still use the same utensils and pots that Maman used, and clean the copper with lemon juice, just as she did, the acid biting into the cuts in my fingers, just as it must have into hers, though she never complained. It’s important to keep up tradition.

  “Go to town for work?” she’d cry. “But there’s always so much to be done here!” A countrywoman to the bone, she found the very notion of leaving the hamlet, let alone the village commune, for work unbelievable. It was enough to make it necessary for her to sit down (a rare event) with a restorative cup of lavender tisane. I don’t think I ever told her how much I would have loved to train as a nurse or a teacher.

  Do I look like a mad old woman now? I suspect I do.

  Maman’s little mirror is long gone. What would be the point of looking in a mirror, anyway? The only visitors are the birds and the wild animals, and the children who dare each other to play mean tricks and risk catching sight of the madwoman who lives here alone.

  Better to be invisible.

  Chapter 8

  The river Sorgue flows green and glassy through Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. The green is extraordinary, a malachite composition of underwater meadows of emerald weeds, reflection of the deep greens on the steep valley above, and the ice-blue purity of the mysterious spring that boils up from a pool beneath the cliffs, a pool so deep they say it has never been accurately measured.

  The village is a dead end, a beautiful place at the end of the line held captive on three sides by fractured precipices that rise steeply into the sky to the great Vaucluse plateau. The remains of a castle cling to the sheerest escarpment, so few of the stones surviving in place that it’s awe-inspiring it was ever inhabited.

  This is where the Italian poet Petrarch wrote love sonnets to his Laura, though the undoubted romance of this association is undercut by the leaden references in every touristic souvenir. In the center of the village is a granite column, which was raised in 1804, according to the inscription, to mark the fifth centenary of Petrarch’s birth. It stands on what has become a roundabout.

  As Dom and I studied the menu at our table in the restaurant closest to the bridge, where the iridescent water seems to still itself to fall over a weir, a wedding party emerged from what must have been a registration session at the mairie: a laughing couple in their twenties; he dark and handsome, she a pretty blonde.

  “You’re quiet.”

  He reached across the table and rubbed my fingers.

  “Am I?”

  “World of your own.”

  That was true enough. But it’s strange, isn’t it, how once you’ve started to notice something, you can’t escape it. Seeing the wedding party was like a trail opening up. I could not resist the temptation to follow it, compelled to know what lay at the end, even though I was well aware that I would almost certainly not like what I found.

  I had tried to put the wild-goose chase to the Mauger house out of my mind. Any stray thoughts of Rachel, too, and her former status as his wife. It had nothing to do with me, or this new life of ours. Marriage between us had never been mentioned. I had accepted, though the subject had never been aired, that I would not be Dom’s wife when we decided to live together in France. As I had never particularly wanted to be married for the sake of being married, that was fine by me. I had certainly never been the kind of girl who dreamed about her wedding day and its swirls of white gossamer, traditional vows, and tiered white cake.

  But my curiosity was whetted. What was she like, what was so special about her that made him want marriage? Was it a large and triumphant family wedding, or an intimate city hall affair?

  It was at that point that it began to dawn on me how little I knew about Dom. There was no one I could ask, no points of reference. I had met very few of his friends and none of his family. That was not quite as odd as it might have been, given that he had met my mother only briefly (an early-evening drink in Brighton) and only a couple of my friends (a farewell dinner in a London restaurant). It hadn’t seemed to matter that we existed in an intimate, private universe of our own devising. For one reason or another, it felt like what we both wanted and needed. Other people were just background noise.

  Of course, even as I write this, I know now how strange that sounds. But it is the truth, and that is what I’m trying to inch toward here, trying to order in my own mind what really happened, as opposed to what I imagined or inferred. At the time, it was all part of the romance of our situation.

  So I bit my tongue and said nothing.

  After lunch, we walked.

  The river, crashing white over mossy boulders, took on the opalescent green-blue of a mallard’s head in the stil
ler reaches. Above, the rock of the cliffs was stacked in diagonal ribs, emphasized by the occasional tipsy line of small trees and scrub that followed the angles.

  Past the sunken arcade that joined the working paper mill, where I couldn’t resist buying a notebook of stiff, thick handmade pages and a packet of plain cards, and past the heavy wooden presses powered by the waterwheel. There were few other people on the dust and gravel path to the spring. Past the line of souvenir stalls, mostly open, several selling tablecloths of iris-blue and purple, mustard-yellow, in the traditional patterns of black olives and silver leaves, flowers and sprays and diamonds.

  “There’s an old Provençal story—‘The Shepherd of Fontaine,’ ” I said.

  I’d been engrossed the previous evening reading the stained and crinkled book of Provençal tales I’d found in the hayloft; strange and compelling tales, full of fairy-tale characters: the shepherd of Fontaine; the magician’s daughter at Castellane; Picabrier and the perfect garden; the ruins of Grimaud. And always there, as shadows over the land, the troubadours and the threat of the Saracens.

  These stories were all rooted in place. The gray limestone crags of the Alpilles, the bare stone range to the south of Avignon. The hot plains and scrubby hills south toward Marseille. The empty uplands of the Lure to the east.

  Dom smiled.

  So, as we walked, comfortably arm in arm, I told him the story of Paradou, the shepherd of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.

  “Paradou was a wild outcast, living with his sheep as if they were his family. He slept in the fields with them, and had little contact with any other humans. He did not wash. He barely spoke, and could not read or write. But there was one old woman who was kind to him, a wealthy widow who lived in a grand farmhouse in Fontaine. Instead of kicks and shouts warning him to keep away, she gave him food.

  “One winter’s day, when Paradou had brought his flock down from the cold high ground on the plateau, one of his sheep climbed up the steep rocks above the spring. Paradou watched it, sure it would fall—and the next moment it had disappeared. Curious, he followed, clinging to the precipice above the green pool and the rushing water. When he came to the place where he’d last seen the sheep, he saw there was a crack in the rock and he managed to squeeze inside. There was no sign of the sheep, but he was able to walk along an interior ledge that led to a cave. And there beneath him was the most beautiful rock pool he had ever seen. The water was a glowing magical green. He sat down beside it and just stared. When he finally moved to stand up, he put his hand on an earthenware jar. He opened it, hoping to find Saracen treasure, but what he found was paper with strange markings on it. For a while he stood, perplexed and disappointed. But as he continued to look, he knew that he had found some kind of treasure after all, even if he did not understand what it was. He emerged from the fissure in the rock face knowing that something extraordinary had happened.

  “After that, he often returned to the secret rock pool. The earthenware jar with its treasure was always still there. And each time he opened out the paper, and stared at the signs on it, he began to understand them a little more, as if a mist was clearing. As if he had once known what the answer was, but it had been lost.”

  By now Dom and I were standing on the stones overlooking the spring. A few other visitors had moved off, and others were lower, out of sight. The illusion was that we were alone there.

  “A treasure map?” suggested Dom.

  “Poems, which he learns to read.”

  Rush and gurgle of the water. The high, sheer crags on three sides enclosing us. I sensed I might be losing him, that he might get bored if I continued at this pace, so I pushed on.

  “The rest of the story gets really farcical—quite odd, really. It turns out the poems are long-lost ones by Petrarch, in the old Provençal language, and the rich elderly widow is Laura de Noves, who didn’t actually die young of the plague in Avignon as she was supposed to have done but managed to pass another victim’s corpse off as her own and run away with Petrarch after all. They had five wonderful years together. He wrote beautiful sonnets to their love. Only then they had a child. And Petrarch found this got in the way of the great love affair that he was so keen on writing about, making his great reputation, so he demanded that she give the boy up . . . Can you see where this is going?”

  “Not the wild shepherd?”

  “Exactly. Paradou. He and the widow turn out, in the best tradition, to be mother and son. They have a great explanation session.”

  “And then it’s happily ever after.”

  “Oh, no. Not at all. It dawns on the son that Laura didn’t hate Petrarch—who subsequently left her anyway to return to Italy, by the way—but that she actually sympathized with him and forgave him for his actions because they allowed him to keep on writing, creating his Great Art. He can’t understand his mother’s forgiveness, and so he kills her. The son clubs her to death—and returns to the wild.”

  Dom was silent.

  “Bet you didn’t see that one coming.”

  “No . . .”

  “They’re strange, these stories. You think they’re fairy tales, and then they suddenly take on this rather modern cruel twist. I mean,” I prattled on, “someone you love just turns around and says, Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I hate you now and I’m going to club you to death . . .”

  The idea of beautiful Provençal songs I had never heard resounded in my head. I wondered whether I had stumbled on a possible translation project in these tales I had never seen in English. Water swashed over rock. I did not realize for some minutes that I was alone.

  “Dom?”

  No response. I called again.

  Quickly, I started down the path back to the village. Around every corner, I was sure I’d see him but did not.

  I was out of breath by the time I doubled back from the paper mill and found him. He was leaning against a tree, back turned to the path.

  “There you are!”

  He said nothing.

  “You just left!”

  Silence.

  “What’s up? Sorry if I was— I didn’t realize you’d gone . . .”

  “No, you wouldn’t have.”

  “I’m sorry, I was only . . . thinking.”

  He looked at me then, and his face seemed distorted. Not angry, exactly, though there was some anger in it, but anguished.

  “What? What did I do?”

  “You looked just like she used to,” he said. “You even talk like she used to. I couldn’t stand it. I kept thinking, this is all a mistake.”

  Don’t say that, I pleaded silently.

  For a few minutes, the sun stabbed through the mottled sky, then all was somber. His pupils shrank to pinpricks in the sudden brightness, and he screwed up his eyes before turning away.

  “Why did you split up with Rachel?”

  Dom hesitated. I put my arm on his and waited.

  But the silence between us stretched until it was unbearable.

  The river babbled past. Its rush over rocks and pebbles filled the still air between us, and a bird gave voice to the shrill cry of hurt I had stifled.

  Slowly, we began to walk back to where we had left the car.

  Chapter 9

  I was caught, of course, when I least expected to be.

  A few days later, Pierre ordered me up to the blind. I was to collect what I had previously hidden under the stone and take it to the house, where I was to slide it under his bed, right under, so that it touched the wall. It was this detail I was wondering about, why it had to touch the wall, rather than what the mission entailed, when Papa’s voice made me start so hard I felt I had lifted off the ground.

  “What have you got there?” He came up behind me quite silently while I was digging in the hollow beneath the stone. He must have stalked me like a deer, and I was cornered.

  Not waiting for any explanation, Papa reached out and took the sack in his big hands. He pulled it open, and, to my startled bewilderment, he slid out a clumsy black iron implem
ent. It must have been a very old-fashioned one, even then, but it was a gun.

  I gasped almost as loudly as he did.

  “What. Is. This.”

  It shook in his hand. Papa’s forehead was tight and red, and seemed about to explode. A vein stood out over one eyebrow.

  “I— I—”

  I was lost for words.

  “Where. Did. You. Get. This.”

  There was no choice. I had to tell him.

  There was a very small stone store on the olive terrace, with the narrowest of slits for a door. It had once been bricked up for reasons that no one knew, and this is where Papa, in ominous, enraged silence, led Pierre and me and pushed us inside.

  It was cold, damp, and dark. Then the only shaft of light was blocked as our father dragged a tabletop against the gap. There were noises outside, like the clunking sound stones make when they hit each other. The noise continued, resonating against the wood, tolling out our father’s fury. I wanted to scream. To beg him to stop and to let us out. Somehow I stopped myself, knowing I would make things worse if I did. All I allowed myself was a shivering whimpering that brought some nasty kicks to the shins from Pierre’s boot.

  Still Papa said nothing. Not even: “I will teach you a lesson you won’t forget.” Just the heavy sound of the rocks striking the other side of the barricade, the sound seeming to rise up.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered.

  Pierre made a scuffing noise on the dirt floor. “We’re being bricked in,” he said, as nonchalantly as you please.

  I started to cry. We were imprisoned in the cold and dark, with no food or water, and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. Then I thought of something that made me shiver so hard it was as if I had been picked up and shaken. This . . . dark space, the size of it . . . It reminded me of the family crypts in the village cemetery. Great boxes of marble with ornate stone and brass carved locks, and names of people with the dates they were born and died.