A few people danced. Some teenagers lit firecrackers, and laughed and chattered when they went off. Beer, wine, and soft drinks were being sold by the glass at a bar that had been set up beside the stage. The square had filled with people. The other tables were all occupied. Monsieur Chalfont joined Louis at his table, still wearing his wilted white jacket and dirty apron, and a handkerchief knotted around his short neck. Beads of sweat stood on his red face. He spoke rapidly and excitedly to Louis about the Festival of Music, and then, yet again, about his stay in Washington. He wondered if Louis knew the hotel where they had stayed, whether Louis had lived in Washington when they had been there. He pointed out everyone he knew. When anyone passed close enough, he introduced them to Louis.
Suddenly, the recorded music was turned off in midsong. After a brief pause while the microphone was adjusted, the live music began. Musette is dance music usually played on an accordion, which for many foreigners, rightly or wrongly, has come to characterize France. Its rhythms are light and energetic, but there is an underlying sadness, a feeling of loss, about it too, a sense of the lilting, skipping, unstoppable passage of time.
Musette came into being in the dance halls of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, when the accordions of Italian immigrants took up the folk songs of migrants from the rural Auvergne. Perhaps it was the music’s contradictions—the joyful melancholy it expressed—that made it irresistible. The musicians who played in the dance halls, at the bals musettes were soon incorporating gypsy music, tangos, swing music, and jazz into their songs. The musette flourished and spread all over France.
Paris dropped the musette in the 1950s to embrace rock and roll, the new music from America. There is, after all, something hopelessly naive about the musette. And the accordion is an unrefined musical instrument. Its sound is mechanical and without nuance. It is inescapably reedy. It is too clumsy to be delicate, and yet too soft to be forceful. Both the instrument and the music it plays feel dated. But in the smaller towns of France, in the countryside, where people heard in the musette the sad, and happy, and slightly outdated rhythms of their own lives, and where the accordion, for all its awkwardness, sang in a voice they knew, they did not let the musette disappear, or the bal where they could dance to it. It is true, that even in the countryside people now listened to rock and roll or to jazz on their radios. But when it came time to dance, even the young, who scoffed at the musette and groaned when it began to play, could not resist its enticing rhythms.
Now the crowd on the square at Saint Leon—old, young, children, everyone—began to dance. They paired up, and moved, and twirled to the quick step as though it were their normal means of locomotion. The dance moved them at different speeds, but all in a counterclockwise direction around the square. It appeared to Louis as though this moment must have been rehearsed. The accordionist played with what sounded to Louis’s unschooled ears like extraordinary skill and dexterity, elaborating and embellishing notes, weaving new intricate melodies around the implied melody, while the great bobbing crowd swirled past, just in front of the table where Louis sat.
Louis had never enjoyed dancing, although whenever Sarah had forced him onto the dance floor, he had acquitted himself with a natural grace that surprised even him. Dancing was the kind of public display he found embarrassing and, if he was completely honest with himself, slightly dangerous. It embarrassed him to move in a way that was both so sensual and so public. Moreover, it felt calculated and dishonest to him, alien somehow to his person, the same way using slang had always felt alien. So, when Madame Chalfont invited him to dance, and Monsieur Chalfont chimed in, insisting he could not possibly appreciate the pleasures of the Festival of Music without dancing, Louis insisted just as adamantly that he could not and would not dance. The two ignored his protestations. They simply would not accept his refusal. Their insistence and determination that Louis should, no, must dance grew stronger, the stronger his resistance became.
He was suddenly struck by the absurd intensity of his refusal. It reminded him of his earlier wariness toward the gypsies. Or maybe it was simply the reflected light of the lanterns playing in the glass of wine that stood in front of him. Whatever the reason, Louis soon found himself in the crowd, circling around the square, holding Madame Chalfont in his arms. She smiled and spoke encouragements to him as, to his surprise, he quickly found his way into the music. Madame Chalfont was a stocky woman, with a red face, crooked teeth, and eyes—one blue and one gray—that looked in slightly different directions. She danced lightly, high on her toes, and unabashedly pressed her body against his.
This was what felt dangerous about dancing. After all, dancing was barely sublimated sex, a fact which everyone else seemed to have no trouble putting out of their minds, but which Louis never forgot when he was dancing. What they were doing seemed illicit to him. He danced with Monsieur Chalfont’s wife while Monsieur Chalfont waved approvingly from the table. He felt her bare arms on his, smelled her hair, felt her breasts, her belly, felt her thighs moving against his, as intimately and as sensually as if they had been in bed together. Madame Chalfont threw her head back and laughed as though she knew exactly what he was thinking.
They danced among the other couples—young lovers, children in their fathers’ arms, couples married for decades, pairs of young girls—circling around and through each other, moving like traffic at different speeds, but all moving, whirling around the square, carried by the accordion’s spinning melodies, adrift in space on the musette, as if the music were yet another small planet, and the dance were life itself. To dance was to live. To dance with Madame Chalfont, to be in orbit with all these other people, reminded him of standing in the pond that night amid the stars. It seemed in that moment as though life and death, happiness and unhappiness, all the contradictions of being were reconciled and given coherent meaning that could never be spoken. It could only be danced.
The music stopped, but within seconds the accordionist struck up another tune. Madame Chalfont was willing, and it was as if they had started life a new, were newborn, were children, were lovers, were dying, all at the same time. The accordionist began to sing as they passed the stage. He sang in a high tenor, and had that rapid vibrato that is exactly right for the musette . It was a clear, startling voice. Louis looked to see the musician as they passed by. It was Phillipe, the gypsy. He wore a bright green suit that was too tight around the middle, a yellow plaid shirt, and a flowered tie. He swayed and sweated as he played and sang. His broad hat kept his face mostly in shadow. Louis could not tell whether Phillipe had seen him or not. But the words that he sang made it seem certain that he had.
Charles the great has come at last,
Come at last to stay.
He knows not where he’s going, though
He thinks he knows the way.
He thinks he knows the way to love,
Through flowered fields and highways.
He does not know what love is or
That I will love him always.
A pretty girl there waits for Charles,
To ease his pain and kiss his eyes,
To circle him with chains of love,
To show him love and make him wise.
Charles the great might disappear
While thinking you can see him.
But life is short and art is long,
And she can live without him.
When the song was finished, Phillipe began another. The Chal-fonts introduced Louis to their neighbor, Madame Bernard, a tall woman with a shy closed-mouthed smile. Louis immediately invited her to dance with an urgency in his voice that made everyone laugh. Madame Bernard’s body was lithe and quick, her back was muscular and arched. She did not press herself against him as Madame Chalfont had. But as they followed the music, their bodies brushed against each other in ways Louis found thrilling. They danced many dances together until they were both tired, and sat down.
Madame Bernard was soon invited to dance by another man, and so Louis foun
d himself asking a woman sitting alone at the next table to dance. She said nothing, but she tilted her head slightly, and smiled at him with raised eyebrows. She appeared to be about his age. She had a pretty face with a long, straight nose, a high forehead, and a cloud of loose brown hair she had pinned up here and there, but to no avail. It tumbled in every direction.
This was Solesme Lefourier, his future neighbor and lover. As she took his hand and stood, he saw that her back was twisted unnaturally. Louis began to apologize, but Madame Lefourier smiled and nodded toward the dancing throng. “I love to dance,” she said.
She danced more carefully than the other women had, taking small, gliding steps while the crowd eddied around them. With each step, she turned her shoulders slightly, and he felt her breasts moving like a soft wave across his chest. She leaned into his right shoulder, pushed her face against his neck, and he found himself looking through the great cloud of her hair.
The square had emptied somewhat when they stopped dancing. Most of the older people had gone. So had the children. Madame Lefourier said she was tired, and Louis apologized for having kept her so long. She thanked him and said how much she had enjoyed dancing. He took her back to the table where her husband now sat. Pierre Lefourier was even then a ponderous man, shaped like a pyramid, and apparently as old. He greeted Louis with a broad, but indifferent, smile.
Later that evening, after the Lefouriers had gone home and the square had emptied, Louis sat with the Chalfonts and gazed at the colored lanterns. “I met the accordionist today,” he said. “Phillipe.”
“Who? Phillipe?” asked Monsieur Chalfont, mopping his red face with the handkerchief he had removed from around his neck. He was still out of breath from the last dance. “Who is Phillipe?”
“The accordionist,” said Louis. “The gypsy. I met him on my walk.”
“But his name is Henri,” said Monsieur Chalfont. “Henri Kadusco. He comes every year to play for the Festival of Music. He is quite well known all over France for his musette. But he comes to Saint Leon every year, for many years. Phillipe? No, no. It’s Henri.”
“Ah, well, the gypsies,” said Madame Chalfont. “They lie about everything.”
“But what a musician,” said Monsieur Chalfont.
In his room, Louis lay on the bed, his hands behind his head. He looked at the dark ceiling. The tall, lace curtains billowed gently into the room, moved, it seemed, by the music that still came from the square.
A pretty girl there waits for Charles,
To ease his pain and kiss his eyes,
To circle him with chains of love,
To show him love and make him wise.
Charles the great might disappear
While thinking you can see him.
But life is short and art is long,
And she can live without him.
He woke up once in the early dawn to hear music still playing. The next time he woke up, the sun was high in the sky and he heard only birds.
At about ten o’clock, Louis thanked the Chalfonts for their extraordinary hospitality and set out for Bueil. From there, he walked on to Saint Paterne-Racan where he slept in a field across from the Chateau la Roche-Racan by the little Ecosais river. He walked on south—Sonzay, Parnay. After two more nights, he crossed the broad Loire at Langeais. He walked through the great Foret de Chinon, where he slept one night, and awoke early to find himself surrounded by a herd of grazing deer. He crossed the Vienne at Sazilly and entered the broad vineyards by Ligre south of Chinon. He walked through the town of Richelieu with its twenty-eight mansions lining the Grande-Rue.
July found him entering the Charente. In his mind, time and space had merged. He walked across the changing face of France, as if his walking were the motion of time, as if time would stop if he were to stop. He was spinning out a silken cord as he walked further and further from equipoise. In his mind, this point of balance, this his own personal version of magnetic north, slowly consolidated and came to be located exactly on the square in the village of Saint Leon sur Dême on the night of the Festival of Music.
One day toward the end of July, he was leaving a small stone church just south of Angouleme. The church stood alone surrounded by fields of lavender. It was an ancient building—from the ninth or tenth century he guessed. Its builders had barely known how to construct an arch. They had stacked up stone on stone to make walls three feet thick with one narrow window, oddly placed high and off-center above the door. It was cool and dark inside the church, and completely empty of any furnishings except for a wooden cross in front and a bell rope hanging down to the hard dirt floor. He had pulled down on the rope until he felt the weight of the bell. But he let it go carefully, not wanting the bell to ring after all. The rope swung briefly against the floor as he released it. Then everything was silent.
It was bright and hot outside. He saw something moving toward him along the track through the lavender. As it drew nearer, he saw it was a horse-drawn cart, and when it came nearer still, he was startled to see that it was the gypsy musician. It was like unexpectedly meeting an old friend. But as the cart approached and Louis stepped off the track and said “Bonjour, Phillipe”—it somehow did not seem proper to call him anything else—the gypsy raised his hat and said, “monsieur,” as if they had never met. The youngest of the women sat beside him, and she smiled at Louis broadly as she had done weeks before. The gypsy spoke angrily to the horse as the cart rolled past. Louis turned to watch. Phillipe’s son sat on the back of the wagon, dangling his legs. Louis waved. The boy waved back. The wagon rolled past the little church and into the distance.
Over the weeks, Louis had sung what he had come to call the Charles song to himself over and over again, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently. He sang it again now in a whisper as though he had suddenly discovered its incantatory powers.
Charles the great might disappear
While thinking you can see him.
But life is short and art is long,
And she can live without him.
Had he disappeared? He had. Walking had transported him further from his life than he had wanted it to, than he had imagined it could. He did not decide to stop then and there. He walked on into Spain, and all the way to Santiago. But now he walked looking backward, wondering whether the delicate cord that spun out behind him would have the strength to pull him back.
His trip had ended, and he had been back in Washington for months, visiting his children, doing research and writing articles about the Middle East and the politics of oil, even consulting with the State Department again, before he had decided to move to France. No, not just to France, but to Saint Leon sur Dême. For he gradually discovered that, despite what he had imagined—that once he was back in Washington his pilgrimage would be gathered into his life and assimilated, would become a part of the whole of who he was, and that his center of gravity would remain, at least for the foreseeable future in Washington, near Jennifer and Michael, and, yes, near Sarah—in fact his center, his point of equilibrium, remained where he had first found it, in Saint Leon sur Dême.
To the utter bafflement of his friends, and the dismay of his children, Louis sold the apartment he had bought after the divorce, put his belongings in storage, and went to Saint Leon to buy a house. When he returned, he told his clients that he would no longer be writing articles for them. Like his friends, they stared at him, uncomprehending. “What will you do there?” they wanted to know. He did not know what he would do there.
“What are you thinking of?” Sarah demanded. “Your children are here. They need their father.” Louis did not have an answer that would even begin to assuage her anger. He acknowledged both the abruptness and the enormity of his decision. “It seems foolish to me too, when I think about it, foolish and . . . to suddenly leave my home for a strange place? I can’t begin to understand or explain it.”
The truth was that Louis was a stranger in Washington. He had always been a stranger in Washington and, for that matter, wherever
he had lived. He was a stranger in his own life. He lived on the edge of his life, unconnected to anyone or anything except in a tentative way, by their expectations of him, by his sense of his obligations and his duties, but not by his heart. These tentative connections seemed the truest thing about him. And now, somehow—as preposterous as it seemed, it must have been the dance—he had plunged into the life of Saint Leon with such intensity and force that his absence from there felt violent and insupportable, making his obligations insignificant in his own mind. He could never have said so to Sarah or anyone else. He could barely allow the thought to enter his mind. But the fact was that the only home he knew was a place where he had stopped for a night.
XV
WHEN LOUIS HAD ARRIVED BACK IN WASHINGTON AFTER WALKING TO Santiago, it had seemed as though he were arriving from another planet. Now, arriving at Dulles Airport after having been away for these many years, Louis felt as though he had only just left. The friendly green hills of Virginia rose up to greet the plane full of travelers. The moist heat enveloped them as they left the plane. The passengers sighed or laughed as they felt it. They were relieved to be off the plane. Louis squinted into the brightness of the day. But time and memory play tricks on us. Except for the white light, the heat, and the verdant landscape, almost nothing was the same.
A great hall had been built to receive international passengers. It was chilly inside. The immigration officials in their open-collared shirts, festooned with silver badges and bright patches, typed each passport number into a computer, then greeted each passenger as they handed back his passport. “Enjoy your stay, Mister Morgon.” Louis’s suitcase came down the chute amidst assorted cases and parcels, and wobbled along the conveyor belt to where he waited. At the exit, officials took the declaration form he had filled out on the plane and waved him past.
A French Country Murder Page 10
