Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides

by John Hanson Mitchell

  For years I had been fascinated by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was one of the exotic powerful women of history, who supported the arts and was a great manipulator of kings and their courts. It is said, among other things, that the power of the queen and the relative weakness of the king in chess games was established in Eleanor’s time. She was a poet and a great lover of the troubadours, and even established “courts of love” where ladies would put on trial the behaviors of their husbands and lovers.

  After I secured my room, I went down to the river and took a little nature walk before dinner. Here I saw wagtails and a couple of sandpipers I couldn’t identify flitting on the grassy banks and stony flats, and also a great fat frog who arced into the river before I could get a good look at him. I wondered if he’d once been a hapless cyclist who got drunk one night and made too much noise at my pension.

  Chinon vintners are said to make a fine, relatively unknown red wine and to celebrate the rainbow god I ordered a vegetable soup, sweetbreads, a specialty of the house of stuffed mushrooms, and a salad of fresh local greens. I ordered a bottle of the local Chinon red and tried to put off returning to my lodgings.

  Near my table at the restaurant I saw an odd collection of well-tanned people dressed in jeans and work shirts, men and women alike. They looked American, or perhaps Swedish or English, but they spoke in a lilting language I couldn’t even begin to recognize. I sat listening, pretending to be attentive to my potage, but in fact trying desperately to sort out what this language could be. One of their party spoke good French with the waiters, the other was able to get by passably, although she had an American accent, and another spoke to the waiters in Spanish, also tinged with a foreign accent. Finally, one of them began speaking perfectly fluent American English, but what she said made no sense whatsoever. Something about her mother in Paris and her monkey. I would have liked to converse with this odd troop but they were just finishing their meal as I arrived and departed before I could engage them. One of their party, a short slim fellow, with blond hair and dark eyes, nodded politely as he passed my table and wished me bon appétit, even though I daresay he knew well enough that I was a fellow countryman.

  Back at the pension, the concierge poked her head out from a lighted doorway at the end of the hall and eyed me.

  “Monsieur has enjoyed himself?” she asked.

  “Oh yes, I’ve had a fine meal, and now am ready for sleep.”

  “Sleep well then.”

  “I shall try. I saw a beautiful rainbow as I was coming into town. I’m sure I’ll have pleasant dreams.”

  “Do not make any noise,” she said.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  I was happy to learn, upon awakening, that I had not been turned into a toad or forced to live in the body of a cockroach, like poor, abused Gregor Samsa. Near the bridge over the Vienne I found a café and after coffee set off into the countryside toward l’Indre River and the confluence of the Loire. The land here rose into long slow hills, flattened into plateaus, and then rolled down again on the other side, with straight roads running through pastures dotted with cows and yellow mustard and isolated small stone churches. Cuckoos called incessantly from the forests; at the verges the twittering of a thousand sparrows filled the air, and the larks above the mustard fields were ascending and trilling and then cascading down to earth again. Friendly country workers in rubber boots and baggy blue trousers shouted encouragements to me as I winged past on my loyal bicycle horse. As I rode through this gentle green land I was flooded yet again with affection for the apparent good spirit and good work of the enduring European peasant and his long-suffering, timeless relationship with the sustaining earth.

  At a small café near the Château d’Ussé, close to the point where l’Indre crosses over La Loire on an aqueduct, leaning against a tree outside the café, I saw a row of four bicycles belonging, quite clearly, to some sort of fellow travelers. The bicycles were burdened with panniers and handlebar bags and draped with extra clothing laid out to dry in the sun. At a table at one edge of the café I saw the same group from the restaurant the night before in Chinon.

  They watched me as I rolled in, and I selected a table far enough away so as to be polite, but not so far away as not to be engaged. The small, blond fellow who had spoken to me the night before appeared to be associated with a very trim, small woman with a short-cropped bowl haircut. The other two were larger and rangy. The woman was cut in the style of a nineteenth-century Gibson girl beauty with a loose cloud of chestnut-colored hair and high cheek bones, but she had a crescent-shaped scar running down her left cheek, like an old-fashioned Heidelberg dueling scar. Her gentleman friend was a dark fellow with black eyes and a brush moustache.

  I pretended not to see them as I selected a table.

  After a polite waiting period, the small man called over. “Didn’t we see you last night in Chinon?” he asked in French, politely granting me the privilege of having successfully disguised myself as a native.

  “Yes,” I said in French, “I thought I recognized you. Where are you from, though?”

  This was all a ruse, we knew each other to be foreign, but they were not as yet sure which language to speak.

  “New York,” their leader said in English.

  I thought as much.

  They were a gang of friends, who, almost on the spur of the moment, they told me, had decided to spend the springtime riding through the Loire Valley. The woman with the dueling scar, Linda, had a mother in Paris, where they were now headed and where they were to end their trip. They appeared to be married to one another, although they all seemed suspiciously intimate. We chatted about our various adventures, as travelers will do, and they seemed decidedly unimpressed by my ambitious idea of pedaling all the way to Scotland. I explained that in fact I had already cheated and had taken a train through La Mancha and driven through the Sierras and part of the Pyrénées in a car. They understood perfectly. I believe they had been on previous bicycle expeditions and knew all about bad hills and wind. Wind, we quite agreed, was far worse than any mountain or hill. All hills have the advantage of a downhill.

  They had been riding back and forth along the Loire for a week and a half, and were now about to head up to Chartres, and then on to Paris. But that day they were off to explore some château in the area that was owned, I was given to understand, by an eccentric friend of Linda’s mother. After a little more sociable chatter, they invited me to join them, and since I was in the famous valley of the Loire and had yet to experience the interior of a single château, I agreed. But first, they wanted to cross the river and visit the green park at the Château d’Ussé.

  Riding single file we crossed over l’Indre River to the château on the other side of the bridge and settled in the park, killing time. Their apparent guide, the dark man, had done his homework. The Château d’Ussé, he told us, was supposed to be the setting for the seventeenth-century version of the fairy tale Brier Rose, collected by the French author Charles Perrault, who is best known for his Mother Goose stories. I related the story of the brier-strewn château I had encountered outside of Châtellerault, and they all agreed that the child must have been a spirit dweller of the ruined building. As we lounged there I told them more about my sun quest and the purpose of my pilgrimage, and I told them of the theory that many of the traditional European fairy tales were in fact metaphors for the transit of the sun through the heavens, and the battles between the forces of darkness and evil, and the victory of the benevolent giver of life, the sun, over the deathly forces of winter.

  “That’s crazy,” the short-haired woman said.

  “No, no, that’s a good theory,” their leader said.

  “It’s crazy,” she countered. “Fairy tales are all about sex, everyone knows that. Red Riding Hood. Sleeping Beauty. She pricks her finger, or whatever it was, and starts to bleed at the age of fifteen. Right? She gets her period, in other words, and then Prince Charming shows up and they do it for the first time and the whol
e world wakes up for her. That’s sex, man. That’s what it’s all about.”

  This thesis begat a wild array of sex banter between them that helped confirm my theory that they were intimate with one another. To avoid further potentially embarrassing details, I carried on with my solar argument.

  “The sun kisses the earth in spring, and the world wakes up after a winter sleep,” I said, modestly. “I mean, that’s the theory. The dead canes of the briers burst into flower when the prince comes.”

  “Right,” Linda said to be polite.

  “Could be, I suppose,” the short-haired woman said.

  There was a brief silence.

  “Shall we go?” the diplomatic leader said, standing up.

  I wondered if they perhaps regretted having tied up with such a weirdo as myself.

  I pedaled along behind them, not knowing exactly where we were going, and after about three miles we halted and consulted some directions that Linda had in a letter from her mother. We turned right on a small paved road and sailed on. After about a mile we could see the old château, rising in the distance at the end of a gravel road that ran between fields of poppies.

  “There it is,” Linda said, “I hope he turns out to be a nice guy.”

  “Hope he’s not one of those de Sadistes,” the leader said.

  “My mother told me he is a little freaky but will manage to be polite to us,” Linda said.

  “Yeah, well we know all about your mother …,” her husband said.

  I was beginning to wonder what adventures I was happening into here.

  It turned out the owner was only slightly eccentric. He was a small rounded fellow, with a large handlebar moustache, whose name was something like Brenôt, and he apparently made his living as a painter, although given the size of his house, a great rambling fifteenth- or sixteenth-century place complete with knights in armor and tapestries, and a few (and I suspect, faux) ancestral paintings, he must have had some money before he took up painting. He was in the process of restoring the château, he said, but it looked to me as if he had added a few ahistorical artifacts of his own. There was a huge stuffed great Dane at the head of one staircase, for one thing, and some nineteenth-century Chinese vases perched here and there.

  Graciously though, he showed us around, proudly demonstrating, to my horror, in an upstairs hall, an oubliette. Enemies of the lord of the manor were simply thrown down to the bottom of this deep well-like closet, and if they did not die in the fall, they were allowed to starve to death. Then the gracious manor lord took us to his studio on the north side of the château. Here on an easel was a full-bosomed nude. This was no goddess or a Renaissance lady by any means. She had a decidedly twentieth-century figure and bore a close resemblance to Brigitte Bardot. All around the room were other Brigitte Bar-dots in various stages of undress, and there were also a few Gina Lollobrigidas and Sophia Lorens and other sex goddesses.

  “Please,” M. Brenôt said to Linda, ushering her to a large canvas leaning against the wall. He swept off the dust cloth and uncovered another full nude. This one was slightly older and fuller. She looked vaguely familiar to me.

  “Lovely,” Linda said.

  They all expressed their appreciation. So did I.

  But it was a horrible, garish painting, realistic in style, with fine brushwork, but ill lit and flat.

  “Who is it?” I asked. They seemed to all know the model.

  “My mother,” Linda said.

  Following our gallery visit, the good M. Brenôt opened a bottle of white wine and gave us a glass for the road, even though it was still morning. Greedy pig that I am, I had been hoping for a full midday meal, with entertainment.

  Following this short visit we wandered back to Azay le Rideau and found a likely looking restaurant where we had lunch together.

  Linda ordered an omelette with asparagus and dug in.

  “Aye lave thas,” she said, resorting to the odd tongue I had first heard them speaking.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “No, but what language was that?”

  “It’s nothing,” Mr. Linda said. “She just talks that way.”

  “Yeah, but you understood,” I said.

  “Aye knay,” said William the leader. “It’s just a way she has sometimes. We’ve cracked her code and now we all speak that way. It’s catching. It’s just English. Then you change all the vowels to flat ‘A’s. ‘Aye knay’ is ‘I know.’”

  “Sorry,” Linda said. “We’ve been together too long. You should come with us to make us normal.”

  Since they were headed for Chartres, where I happened to know there was, embedded in the stone floor, another solar emblem in the form of an elaborate eleven-course labyrinth, not to mention the best stained glass in Europe, I was sorely tempted. It was good to ride with some company for a while, although they were such a tight little group, I probably would have evolved into one of those annoying outsiders who couldn’t even speak their language and they would have regretted their invitation.

  Near the town of Langeais they turned and took a small road inland toward Chartres. I bid them farewell and watched them pedal off, silently. They were like work horses, somehow, just doing their duty, pacing off the miles.

  I began to feel lonely again.

  From Langeais I rode on toward Le Mans, passing over rolling hills to Château-la-Vallière, where I got a cheap room and listened to cars wailing through the town all night. The next day I followed an unpaved road for a stretch to the town of Villiers-au-Bouin, crossed La Loire again, pedaled on to Vermeil, and then stopped at Laigne to get away from a horrid busy road and take a drink. An old man at the bar said he could tell I was an American right away.

  “How is that?” I asked, knowing full well.

  “Because you have a good clear look about you. Boys like you came here in 1944 and saved this town. Thank you,” he said, shaking my hand earnestly.

  “Don’t thank me, Monsieur, I wasn’t even born. Thank my Uncle John. He fought in the war.”

  “Well thanks to your Uncle John, and all the good soldiers,” he said, winking.

  I did not tell him my Uncle John was a doctor who had spent the war in India.

  “I tell you one bad thing though,” the old man said. “Americans fight too much each other. There was a black regiment here. Each night they come to town to look for girls. Then the white regiment comes in. Then they fight each other. And then …,” he waved his hand in dismissal and blew out his cheeks, “Police …”

  This man told me, after he heard my plans to cross to England at Le Havre, that there was going to be a ferry strike and I wouldn’t make it. He said he knew many fishermen who would take me over, bicycle and all. But I only half believed him and didn’t take him up on the offer.

  “Well good luck to you,” he said, shaking my hand again, and patting my back. “And my best to your mother.”

  This last was a strange addition. I hadn’t said a word to him about my mother, although, oddly enough, she was leaving soon for Denmark and I had planned to call her there in a few weeks and had been thinking about her that day.

  Things began to go downhill after Vermeil. I had to ride on a busy road to get into Le Mans and then I made the mistake of booking a room in a 1930s Bauhaus-style hotel. I salvaged what was left of the day by wandering around the old city and thinking of the last days of Eleanor’s son Richard, and the slow, sad end of the troubadours. Le Mans was about the northernmost point for the southern-based troubadours, and was the border with the tougher, French-dominated culture of the north.

  The next day I learned that there really was a ferry strike and my chances of getting to England were pretty poor, at least for a day or two. I spent a nasty day wheeling up to Le Havre anyway, and learned even worse news. It would be three maybe four or even five days before the strike was resolved, rumor had it. And here I was stuck in the industrial port city squalor of the north under that gray English Channel
sky, having so recently left the green pastures of the Loire and the Aquitaine. I went into a bad bar where sailors were drinking despondently, ordered a hot café crême, and tried to rethink my plans.

  I couldn’t think of a single good reason to hang around this part of the world waiting for labor and management to work out their differences when I was no more than an hour or so by train from Paris. If I was going to wait in a depressing smoky bar for a strike to end, I might as well wait in my old smoky stomping grounds on the Left Bank.

  This thought alone improved my mood and by that evening I was on the train for the City of Light.

  Nine

  The City of Light

  For a while during my student years and afterward, I had lived in Paris, near the Place Monge, and had sporadically attended the Sorbonne and involved myself in the international world of sometime students, radicals, and artists who inhabited the underbelly of the Left Bank. Like many American students I had originally come to Europe to attend university, but I liked it so much I stayed on and managed, albeit illegally, to find work to support myself. I gave away all my American clothes and attempted, by acquiring a smattering of European languages, to obscure my decidedly American identity.

  This was the first time I had been back in the city in ten years and, as soon as I arrived, I went out to look for my old friends. Most of the people I knew would gather every day at a place called the Café Saint Placide, and the morning after I got to Paris, I went there for coffee. Not surprisingly, except for a friendly waiter named Gilbert, everyone had departed for other adventures, and the café itself had declined sadly, I thought. It was bright and noisy and crowded with older, rough-looking types, none of whom I knew.