Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  Le Presbytère’s winter guest having gone to Paris for the day, I will lunch on the mount. It is still only eleven o’clock, so first I will climb the steps up to the abbey.

  I know Grande Rue’s shop keepers and restaurateurs.

  Edwige, her wrinkled eighty-year-old face always smiling, is standing outside her souvenir shop.

  “Miss!” she greets me. Never doc for which I am always thankful. She has been in my life from when my parents opened the guest house.

  She greets me with two kisses on each of my cheeks.

  “I’m going to call it a day,” she says.

  She is going to retire to an old-age home in Rennes.

  “Will you not miss the mount, Edwige?” I ask.

  “The mount, yes, but not the stupid tourists. These days they want everything for nothing.”

  Hortense and Joël, her mentally challenged son, wave to me from the inside of their souvenir shop. I can see Joël wants to come outside, obviously to talk to me, but his mother, who is unpacking painted plates from a large carton on which is printed the words Fragile – China, sternly shakes her head. She points to the carton and he retrieves a plate from it which he places on a shelf behind him. On the picture painted on the plate, the mount is surrounded with a very blue sea on which tiny boats with red sails bob. Below the mount, in gilded lettering are the words, Le Mont Saint Michel.

  Waiters in black trousers, white shirts and shiny black patent-leather shoes are laying the tables in the restaurants. Red is the favourite colour for table cloths in the cheaper restaurants. White linen is that of the expensive ones, their matching napkins folded into lilies and placed on the porcelain side plates. Where the cloths are red, the napkins are of white paper and folded into pockets which hold the knife, fork and a spoon. “Paper napkins save on the laundry bill,” as Frascot always says.

  Build here and build high had said Archangel Michael to Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, and Aubert had done as instructed, and, now, there are nine-hundred steps from Grande Rue to the abbey. Often, have I climbed these steps and today I will do so again. Once a monk, seeing me out of breath as I was climbing, told me to zigzag up the steps and I will not become out of breath and certainly the climb will not exhaust me. Today, this is what I do. Right. Left. Right and left again. Japanese tourists coming up from behind me start to zigzag too. Some of the women begin to giggle. Perhaps they think I am playing the fool, or worse, I am drunk. If they are capable of giggling, I think, they do not have to copy my zigzag technique. At around the six-hundredth step several of the Japanese stop climbing and begin to take photographs of the granite marvel ahead of us.

  I continue zigzagging, going up and up.

  I know a stone bench in one of the abbey’s many vaulted chambers and this is where I will sit for a while before I descend for lunch. I will not be stopping to rest because the zigzag way really does not make one tired but for a few minutes of contemplation.

  To my delight, the Japanese are nowhere in sight.

  -0-

  The chamber where I choose to sit is long and narrow and along one wall stand six stone benches. But for a woman, old as I can tell from her shrunken frame and bent shoulders, because her face I cannot see it being hidden under a black mourning veil, I am the only one in here. Centuries ago, in the wall behind me an embrasure had been chiselled to hold cannon. Before sitting down, I had stood at the embrasure, the rough stone cutting into my elbows, and looked at the sea in the distance, at this sea between France and England, a dull grey, and motionless at this hour of the day.

  Against the wall, to my right, under an arch, hangs an icon from two long iron chains which have been affixed to the high vaulted ceiling. On the icon Mary is cradling baby Jesus in her left arm. She is in blue, wearing the traditional kerchief of the Orthodox Jewish woman that she was. Baby Jesus, usually naked on an icon, is in a green long-sleeved dress and a brown cloak. On the haloed Mary and the haloed Jesus’ left drifts Archangel Michael, wings and sword aloft as here on the mount, and on their right drifts Archangel Gabriel holding a three-bar cross. The two archangels are gilded as is the frame around the icon.

  The old woman gets to her feet and shuffles past me. She does not look at me. She is wearing bedroom slippers: in this weather? She reaches the icon and kisses it and next disappears through an archway to her right.

  From somewhere above the abbey drifts three bell strokes. Almost immediately another three short strokes ring out. It is twelve o’clock on my watch and a monk must be sounding the noon Angelus. I wait for the third and final triple ring for confirmation. At its first stroke, a dove flies through the embrasure and with wings fluttering circles around the icon and, as the old woman has just done, it disappears through the archway on the right, its wings dipped, ready to land.

  I sit very still.

  As I child I adored the sound of bells ringing, and once, Miss Matigot asked my classmates and I what we wanted to be when we were grown up, and my answer was, “Miss, I am going to be a monk and I will ring the bells on the mount.” Her reply was a smile and nod.

  Inside the main gateway of our Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque cemetery there hangs a copper bell, green with rust, from an iron crossbar attached between two granite rocks. The bell, and no one in the village can remember a time when it was not there, is only ever rung to announce a burial: three times three tolls if a man is to be laid to rest, and three times two tolls for a woman.

  Father Pierre had tolled that bell for both my mother and father, the clanks resonating over the tombs.

  -0-

  I get up and walk from the chamber.

  The Japanese from earlier reappear and begin to descend the steps down to Grande Rue with me. No need to zigzag now. One of the Japanese men points at me and next at his camera. I point at his camera and next at myself and I nod. He points to where I must stand: he wants the sea as background. His ‘thank you’ to me is a slight bow, his right hand lifted in front of him. Oddly, Le Presbytère has never had a Japanese or Chinese guest.

  The usual bustle reigns on Grande Rue so I decide to skip lunch. The sky, a glowing blue because the day is after all not windy and wet, I turn off into a narrow footpath which winds between bare rocks. Behind me, towers the abbey, and Archangel Michael is brandishing his sword. As always.

  And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon: and the dragon fought and his angels; And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven ...

  And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him …

  Revelation 12, verses seven to nine.

  I sit down on one of the rocks, one I always come to sit on. Near me, perching on another of the rocks, a gull emits a high-pitched screech. “Would it not be nice if we can be little birds so we can fly across the sea?” I one day said to my father. “Do we have to be just little birds, Bella?” he replied. “I want us to be seagulls. We will be seagulls. We will flap our powerful wings and fly off on a journey which will take us across all the oceans of our world to lands we do not even know exist.”

  “Don’t fill the child’s head with wishful thinking, Rody,” my mother reprimanded him.

  Bella must know that man is bound to earth, she added. Bound to the earth like goats and sheep and donkeys.

  Indeed, Mother, and to the innards of the earth we return.

  -0-

  After my father’s burial I came here to the mount, took this footpath here and came to sit on this rock, ‘my’ rock as I think of it.

  Rodolph Wolff was a Protestant, but his post-war experience in France having robbed him of his childhood faith, he had told my mother on more than one occasion he did not want a religious funeral.

  “You can just throw me away,” he used to joke.

  Having received my mother’s telephone call that my father had passed away, I immediately set off for Sain
te-Marie-sur-Brecque. On my arrival, my mother’s brothers, their wives and children and even a couple of grand-children were already gathered at Le Presbytère, the guest house’s paying guests doing their best to remain out of sight. Marius and Marion still to arrive - they had left the girls with a friend in Paris - I, not wanting to be obliged to make conversation with those uncles of mine, drove down to the mount. It was a mid-summer day, a Monday, and business on Grande Rue was brisk, but I was in search of silence, so I took the footpath to this rock. After my father’s burial, I, again seeking silence, came to sit here once more.

  My father’s burial was dignified.

  “We cannot bury Mr Wolff without even a prayer,” Father Pierre told my mother.

  The priest had just then learnt from her she wanted to respect my father’s wish not to have a funeral service.

  “My husband was a Protestant,” she feebly offered the priest as reason for such a wish.

  “What will the villagers think of us?” asked one of my uncles.

  The pallbearers, provided by the undertakers, carried my father’s coffin from the guest house to their hearse parked under the copse of trees out front. At the cemetery, Father Pierre, having tolled the bell at the gate three times three, we stood around the freshly-dug hole in the ground, the coffin resting on ropes and which would gently lower it into the grave. A little way behind us stood four burly gravediggers in blue overalls, impatiently tapping their cracked fingers with the earth-filled fingernails, against their spades: they were eager to get their day’s work done because their wage was a mere pittance.

  “We are gathered here today to return the body of Rodolph Wolff to its rightful master: God our Father,” began Father Pierre.

  At that time, twelve years ago, he was still a young man with black hair and firm skin.

  Following those words of his, a sigh - perhaps it was from my mother because the priest was not honouring my father’s wish of keeping religion out of his burial - rose in the air.

  Next, one of the mourners coughed.

  It was a dry, artificial cough, which might have come from Marius as his way of telling our mother not to be angry at Father Pierre.

  As for the priest, he, unperturbed by the interruption, opened the small leather-bound Bible which he was holding, flipped through it, and, also coughing, but a genuine cough filled with mucus, a shiny drop of it landing on his lower lip, swept his eyes over us.

  “First Letter of John, Chapter 3, Verse 1,” he said.

  He began to read. See the great love the Father has bestowed on us that we would be called children of God, and that is what we are.

  Again, he coughed, but without leaving a mucus deposit on his lower lip, and neither on his upper.

  “… children of God,” he repeated.

  He spoke slowly, emphasising every word and looked towards my uncles, all of them dressed in black suits and wearing black ties.

  Yet again, Father Pierre flipped through his Bible. Who had given him that Bible, I wondered? A loving, proud mother at his First Communion? A sad mother at his ordainment as a priest, crying silent tears because he will never give her a grandson or granddaughter?

  “The Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 10, Verse 34,” he said. “I will read if any of you want to follow the reading in … huh … your own Bible.”

  No one held a Bible.

  He began to read. As Peter said to the people, ‘In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him. You know the word that he sent to the Israelites as he proclaimed peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. He commissioned us to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.

  A honey bee buzzed around his head and Marius stepped forward as if he wanted to chase it, but quickly the bee flew off: he might have decided he did not yet want to die so was not going to sting the priest or any one of us.

  The bee’s interference had however resulted in Father Pierre closing his Bible and holding a hand out to my mother. She went to stand beside him.

  “So, we are all children of God, and if we remember what Peter had said, God shows no partiality. God has no favourites. God does not say, ‘Come, you who are French, come let me embrace you’, just as God does not say, ‘Away with you who are not French’,” he said.

  While saying that he had looked at my mother, but next he swept his eyes over us and finally rested them on one of my uncles, the oldest of my mother’s siblings and considered the head of the Desmarais clan.

  “Child of God,” he said, speaking into that uncle’s face. “God is our judge. He is judge of the living and of the dead. We, His children, will receive His forgiveness. And today, here, we are burying one of God’s children: Rodolph Wolff. We are burying one of us. We are burying him as one of us. We are all the same before our God.”

  After a short pause, his eyes closed as if in a silent prayer which he did not wish to share with us, he opened his eyes and swept them over us - right, left, and right again - and, his face up to the sky and his eyes yet again closed, he began to pray out loud.

  “O God, thou who hast commanded us to love our neighbour, we now ask you to receive, through Your mercy the soul of this man for it to rest in peace in the company of Christ who died and now lives. Unite us, the living, together as a family in Christ, to sing Your praise forever and ever. Amen.”

  His prayer said, with a brief movement of his hands, he motioned to the pallbearers they could lower the coffin into the gravediggers’ new hole. The coffin in the hole, he took my mother by the hand and led her to the grave. Beside the grave stood a bucket filled with red roses. Using his hands, he motioned to my mother that she could take a rose to drop on her husband’s coffin.

  For the next few minutes, in silence, each of us - Marius, Marion and I, and the mourners - dropped a rose onto the coffin. Marion also dropped a white handkerchief onto the coffin. Whether it was deliberate or an accident I did not know, but by the stern look Marius shot in her direction, I think it was not deliberate. As the hanky fluttered down to the coffin, I saw it was stained with my sister-in-laws bright red lipstick.

  Back at Le Presbytère, Gertrude having been excused from attending the burial, was making a fuss over the lamb stew sizzling on two large three-legged pots set out in the back garden. One of Frascot’s waiters, on loan to the guest house for the day, was filling glasses with champagne.

  That was life, I thought: my father was dead and we were drinking to his happiness. Wherever he was.

  Plates of stew being handed out, I slipped away to the mount.

  -0-

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It is a week ago that I went to sit on ‘my’ rock on the mount.

  Colin is not back yet from Paris, but should be here before nightfall. He left a message on Le Presbytère’s answerphone. Bella, Bonjour. This is Colin. Just calling to say I will be staying in Paris a little longer and won’t be back with you until Friday week. Bye for now. Oh, the weather’s lousy here. See you!

  Paris in mid-November. The Christmas decorations will be going up or may be hanging already. Avenue des Champs-Élysées will be all tinsel and light, and in the windows of Galaries Lafayette glittering pink fairies will descend from the ceiling to snow-covered forests where animated bears and reindeers will be waiting with transparent coaches to take them … take them where? To some magic world perhaps. And over loudspeakers will come the voice of the late Tino Rossi: Petit papa noël, quand tu descendra du ciel…

  It has been just like old times at Le Presbytère this past week. By old times I do not mean my childhood when my parents were here, but the years since my mother’s illness and death and I began to close the guest house for winter.

  I have been reading.

  I phoned Marius and Marion in the evenings.


  I watched American sitcoms on television.

  Finally, I got down to dusting the library room, and I went driving around. I drove away from the mount to places with names sounding strange to the ears of our foreign guests. Conches-en-Ouche. Ferté-Fresnel. Crévecoeur-en-Auge.

  Fred came round. He thought, Colin being English, he would be a chess player, and they could play a game. Yes, Fred is good at chess. He frowned when he heard Colin has gone to Paris for the week.

  “Paris? Why do people go to Paris, Miss, I ask you?”

  “Museums, Fred.”

  “Why did he go to Paris, Miss?”

  “Fred, you surely know here at Le Presbytère we do not question our guests,” I told him.

  “Miss, I thought …”

  He did not finish the sentence and I thought, Fred don’t think.

  Yesterday, Thursday, I drove down to the village. I contemplated asking Gertrude if she could come up to Le Presbytère to cook Colin something nice on Saturday evening, but as I turned into her street I changed my mind and made a U-turn. He will eat whatever I will concoct with what I have in the freezer. I did however drive on to the bakery and asked Amandine for some dry cookies.

  “Why not apple tart, Miss?”

  “I need something that will keep. We had your great amandine last time so I would like something else this time.”

  “Ahh! This time? I say. I say. Sounds promising.”

  Amandine grinned from ear to ear and just then Olivier stepped from the back. He too was grinning from ear to ear.

  “What do you suggest?” I quickly asked Amandine.

  “Let me see. Something that will keep…”

  “Palmiers,” said Olivier. “I’ve just taken some from the oven. Palmiers and … why not madeleines?”

  “Indeed,” I said, “why not madeleines?”

  “Would you need jam?” Amandine asked.

  I told her I still have a lot of Gertrude’s strawberry jam, but asked what she could suggest.