by Ann Barry
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 1996 by The Estate of Ann Barry
Map copyright © 1996 by Laura Hartman Maestro
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
http://www.ballantinebooks.com
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Georges Borchardt, Inc.: “The Child” from THE LICE by W.S. Merwin. Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 by W.S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc.
Graywolf Press: “Cows” from AS IF IT MATTERS by Eamon Grennan. Copyright © 1992 by Eamon Grennan. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-97100
eISBN: 978-0-307-77565-8
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Introduction
OPENING A DOOR 1 My House
2 My Neighbors
3 My First Guests (i.e., Jean and the Bats)
GETTING ACQUAINTED 4 Marketing
5 The Staff of Life
6 House Improvements
7 Gone Fishing
8 Uninvited Guests
9 Breakdown
10 Family Dinner
COMMITMENT 11 My New Car
12 A New Garage
13 On the Road
14 An Old Friend
15 Chien Méchant
16 Not a Drop to Drink
17 House Research
18 The Film
About the Author
Introduction
Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
—Gertrude Stein, “Paris France”
My deep attachment to France began in the fall of 1971, when I rented a farmhouse in the Périgord that two neighborhood Brooklyn friends, Joan and Richard Tup-per, were in the process of restoring.
My one obligation in their absence was to contact the local mason, who was to have completed a stone wall. Its purpose, my friends had explained, was to discourage the neighbor’s cows from tramping through the property. The wall was supposed to start at the road, run in a somewhat straight line down the hill close to the house, and end at the field. The cows, who grazed in the field and were herded home past the house, would then take the route on the far side of the wall from the house.
When I arrived, I could see that the wall had been only partially finished. I called on the mason, who promised to renew his efforts and finish the job within the week. Meanwhile, I made the acquaintance of neighboring farmers, who provided me with fresh-laid eggs (with Halloween-orange yolks) and milk still warm from the cow. To my dismay, they all pooh-poohed the wall: le grand mur de Chine, they called it, guffawing and slapping their knees.
Despite the neighbors’ mockery, I was pleased to see the wall completed and to have had a small part in accomplishing this for my friends. It was shoulder-high to a cow, solid, and well constructed. On the other hand, I was a little sorry to sidetrack the animals. Cows seem so harmless and benign, working their cuds, batting their gentle eyes. I have a favorite poem, titled “Cows,” by Eamon Grennan, which captures their special charm. It reads in part:
I love the way a torn tuft of
grass and buttercups and clover sway-dangles
toward a cow’s mouth, the mild teeth
taking it in—purple flowers, green stems, yellow petals
lingering on the hinged lips foamed with spittle.
I love the slow chewing sound as transformation starts: the pulping roughness of it, its calm deliberate solicitude, its entranced herbivorous
pacific grace, the carpet-sweeping sound of breath
huffing out of pink nostrils. Their eyelashes—
black, brown, beige, or white as chalk—have a minuscule precision, and in the pathos
of their diminutive necessity are the most oddly human thing about them: involuntary,
they open, close, dealing as our own do with what inhabits, encumbering,
the seething waves and quick invisible wilderness of air.
One evening not long after the completion of the wall, I was standing by the kitchen window, washing greens and slicing tomatoes for my dinner salad, and gazing approvingly at le grand mur de Chine. Suddenly the large, doleful eyes of a cow met mine. The great beast froze for a moment, the enormity of its face captured in the frame of the open window. I could feel the warm current of its breath. The cow passed, and was followed by another, and another. Eventually, the whole herd plodded before the window, some taking a sidelong, disinterested glance. They had chosen the inside track of le grand mur at the far end—their well-worn route—to wind their way back to the familiar barn. Le grand mur de Chine—I could hear the gleeful echoes.
As the days passed at the farmhouse, the lazy pace of country life took over. The fall foliage was all buttercup yellow (where were the russets and scarlets of home?). The light was golden. I made applesauce from the free fall in the field. I cooked a rabbit for the first time in my life—overcoming a slight horror when I discovered its stark skinned nakedness at the feet of an old black-garbed farmer woman in the marketplace. For breakfast, I had its gamy liver on toast. I wanted to try it all—whatever was different from the plain fare of my Midwestern (suburban St. Louis) upbringing. I made picnics of sausage, cheese, great crusty sourdough bread from the village baker, local wine. I spent a weekend on a nearby farm, learning from an energetic young couple how to make confit and foie gras. I tooled around from village to village in Richard and Joan’s 1954 Citroen Onze Légère, a majestic, although temperamental, black beauty with rosebud petit-point upholstery—and in a burst of panache bought a beret in the clothing stall at a market to match the flamboyant mood the car inspired in me.
Midway through my stay, I decided to try an experiment. I would ignore watches and clocks, and simply follow nature’s rhythm: sleeping and rising according to the light, eating when I was hungry. In my modest Thoreau-like existence, I didn’t miss the comforts of home. There was pleasure in taking a cold sponge bath in the old tub and squatting over the primitive toilet in the bathroom, which, yet to be restored, was attached to the outside of the house. I slept on a cot before the dying embers in the great stone fireplace. I was happy in a way I’d never been before. I was nearing thirty, largely uncertain of where my life was headed. Here, I was unfettered, simply at peace.
I took other vacation trips to France, but none compared with those halcyon days. Then, one morning on my way to work in Manhattan, I ran into Richard on the No. 3 subway train. He had some photographs of other properties in the area that were for sale. I moaned, seeing dreams pass before my eyes. You can do it, too, he said emphatically, and gave me the address of a French real-estate agent, who was, in fact, an Englishman. The idea hit me full force. Could I do it?
The agent sent me photographs of several properties. One with a sunny view of a little stone house in the village of Carennac utterly captivated me. Joan was in France at the time and, since she had a real-estate license, could serve as an intermediary. I could imagine her charming the French: she is an attractive blond-haired, blue-eyed woman with a sparkling personality and Southern manners. She man
aged to open up a personal bank account for me so that I could funnel funds from New York. Scraping every penny together, and initially splitting the cost of the house with my adventuresome older brother Gene (whose share I eventually bought), I came up with the complete payment.
That was twelve years ago. And here I am, a propriétaire.
Casual acquaintances find it surprising that a single woman would have a house in France. Since I have a full-time job—and a co-op, and two cats—in New York, I’m only able to spend a couple of weeks there twice a year. Why invest in such a remote outpost? Don’t I rent it out? Renting, I respond, would not be worth the hassle. The truth, however, is that the house is a private and precious corner of myself that I’m reluctant to open up to strangers.
Close friends, on the other hand, find my owning the house perfectly understandable. They appreciate my love of France. They also know me to be a loner, a tendency that began in childhood and has continued to this day.
My father, who died just after I returned from my first European trip (a vicarious pleasure for him), suffered from severe depression, at a time and in a place where it was little understood. He was a self-created recluse, trapped, he felt, in a corporate job, with a wife, by a family, in a community to which he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—relate. He was a dreamer. He read mostly escapist literature: mountain-climbing and deep-sea adventures, foreign explorations, and the like. His often-reiterated message was never to settle down before seeing the world. Relationships could be snares, illusive traps, prisons. He refused to meet any of my beaux, even though I seriously dated a number of young men—they were not part of the future he held for me. I would be going to college and then to Europe, which would prepare me for a life less constrained than his.
My mother endured the stress of her marriage because she was a deeply religious person, and strongly committed to family and children. But when I approached marriageable age, she never nudged me in that direction. My two older brothers were settled and married with children. Her unspoken message to me was that there could be an equally satisfying path in life as an independent woman. I believe she found in me a ticket to the world she herself had never known. By the time I acquired the house in France, my mother was quite elderly and frail. I regret that I was never able to share it with her. She only saw my house in pictures.
I secreted the misery of my parents’ life from friends. But there was a price: childhood and adolescence became an isolated, schizophrenic existence. Life within my home seemed the reality; the outside world was a shell surrounding me, false, superficial. People in that world—my school friends, most importantly—were naive, duped, ignorant of the dark side of life.
One childhood friend, Christine Lankford, was separate from all others. She lived up the block. Christine went to the public grade school and I went to Mary Queen of Peace; going, as we did, to different schools made it possible for us to create and share a private world all our own. Christine had curly strawberry-blond hair and creamy skin that picked up the rosy reflection of her hair. She was sweet-natured, unexcitable, unimaginative. I could reinvent myself in a world only the two of us shared. I could be whoever I chose with Christine, and since I had a wild imagination, this took various forms.
There was a house on our street, weathered and weed-infested, that was said to be haunted. Its real-life tenants appeared infrequently. I had decided that they were a gangster and his floozy from Los Angeles, where they were rumored to operate when they weren’t in St. Louis suburbia. Indeed, the couple did have a low-life appearance, he unshaven and often shirtless, with shifty eyes that never connected with a neighborhood child’s, she raven-haired and voluptuous, with dresses defining an hourglass figure and revealing bosom and calf. When they returned from their life of crime, as I imagined it, they would sit on the front steps of the house, drinking beer, defying their gentrified neighbors. They had a salivating three-legged bulldog that prowled the front yard. This cast of unsavory characters, I decided, needed a detective on the case. I began a file on the couple, describing their “history” and the precise dates and hours of their comings and goings. But this was inadequate. For important clues, it would be necessary to get inside the house. In one of their absences, I persuaded Christine to be my accomplice. While she stood faithful watch, her head jerking like a startled bird’s, I threw a fist-sized rock through the window of the back door. And—how simple—we were in. Christine, a quaking sentinel, waited in the living room, where she could keep her eyes peeled on the street, while I rifled through drawers and closets. I found a cleaning bill, a movie ticket stub, a bottle of dried-up hot-pink nail polish. I pocketed them for my files. That was it. Not much to go on.
While Christine ran for home on some pressing business, I climbed the apple tree in the backyard to record our investigation in my dossier. Christine never ratted, or even referred to the incident again. I kept it to myself—and never confessed my crime to the parish priest. This was surprising, because I was always trying to dredge up some worthwhile sin for which I could be absolved. About the best material I could come up with was on the level of lying that I’d fed the parakeet or cheating during a game of Monopoly. This “breaking and entering” was a far more serious matter, but it remained connected to a realm of fantasy.
Yet this adventure informed me about myself. I would dare what others wouldn’t. I would invite rarefied experience. And, however risky, or even mistaken, I felt irreproachable.
Another encapsulated world within the real world was that of the movies. As a child, I spent hours at the cinema. Movies cast such a spell on me that I forgot who or where I was. The first film I remember was The Wizard of Oz, where I was taken with my Brownie troop under the supervision of our leader. Dorothy’s plight was more than I could bear to watch. I crawled under the seat and cupped my palms over my ears. I was discovered—a ball of fear—when the Brownie body count at the end of the film came up with one missing.
On Saturday afternoons, all the kids went to the local movie house for a double feature. The packed, darkened house was a riot of activity: popcorn wars; constant “musical chairs” as mercurial children jockeyed allegiances, both romantic and otherwise; brawls and stampedes in the aisles. An adult wouldn’t have set foot in this madhouse. The soundtrack was set at an ear-shattering level, in a futile attempt to overwhelm the noise of the live audience. Meanwhile, the screen was alive with dramatic newsreels and heart-pounding westerns and romances—inspiring subjects that were larger than ourselves. I felt swallowed up, frightened of drowning in this chaotic vortex, cowering yet content in my obscurity.
Today I prefer going to the movies by myself, when I’m lost in the cavernous dark and surrounded by strangers, Italo Calvino captures something of this in The Road to San Giovanni:
It was a time when the cinema became the world for me. A different world from the one around me, but my feeling was that only what I saw on the screen possessed the properties required of a world, the fullness, the necessity, the coherence, while away from the screen were only heterogeneous elements lumped together at random, the materials of a life, mine, which seemed to me utterly formless. The cinema as evasion, and certainly evasion was what I got out of the cinema in those years, it satisfied a need for disorientation, for the projection of my attention into a different space, a need which I believe corresponds to a primary function of our assuming our place in the world, an indispensable stage in any character formation.
Today, the movies remain a satisfying disorientation: leaving the cinema in the afternoon, as from a cocoon of perpetual night, I’m flummoxed by the daylight.
I still find great satisfaction in being in places—a town, a hotel room—aware of the fact that no one, not even close friends, knows where I am. I am free; I am uncompromised. When I left St. Louis to seek a career in New York, driving across country, I stopped at a motel in Cleveland for one night. At that moment, completely alone, whereabouts unknown, I felt finally liberated and unburdened. My father’s message had
taken root. My mother’s spirit was with me.
When the possibility of the house in France arose, I was in my midforties. I had no ancestral ties to the country; my father’s side of the family was Irish, my mother’s German. France stirred the dreamer and romantic in me. It had elegance and sophistication, the arts and high fashion, castles and royalty, cafés where literary figures whom I revered had actually sat, haute cuisine—in short, all that my Midwestern suburb lacked. Burdened with the childhood guilt for my parents’ conflicts, I had remained at home until graduation from college. I had never had the experience of living with peers. And, though I had had my share of affairs (my first serious love came along in my junior year), I had never truly contemplated marriage. An elderly French bachelor might say, “Je n’ai jamais trouvé ma chaussure” (I never found my shoe), but for me it wasn’t quite that simple. I wanted to avoid the trap in which I’d seen my mother. The prospect of the house came at a time in my life—settled in a job, settled in the co-op—when I was ready to turn a corner, take a plunge. Its remoteness suited me.
The département of the Lot, in Southwest France, is usually overlooked by guidebooks (pray that it continue, I secretly hope), which tend to focus on its westerly neighbor, the Dordogne. The Lot shares with the Dordogne the same appealing type of stone houses with red-tiled roofs and a hearty cuisine, centering on confits of preserved duck and goose, foie gras, truffles, prunes, and walnuts. Cahors is the préfecture of the Lot; it is also the name of the lusty “black” wine of the region. North of Cahors is the Gramat Causse, the largest causse, or limestone plateau, in the Quercy. It is the spot where the winding river Lot, a tributary of the Garonne, flows over rocks and loops around picturesque towns. The Dordogne River, which, in what the Michelin calls its “Quercy stretch,” snakes around Carennac. The mountainous Auverge lies to the east. The Corrèze, to the north, boasts the famous china-making center of Limoges, as well as my train stop in Brive-la-Gaillarde. Because the Lot has no particular glitz—“castling,” caving, and canoeing are as racy as it gets—its gentle landscape invites you to pause, rest awhile, leave behind your worries.
