At Home in France

by Ann Barry

  15

  CHIEN MÉCHANT

  A daily constitutional is a vital part of my life at the house. I drive to the valley, where the terrain is flat, for a comfortable run. I have mapped out two different routes. One is an eight-kilometer run, flat from start to finish, from the bridge over the Dordogne to the village of Puybrun, where Monsieur Jean Mas, the all-important notaire, lives. I walk one way and run back. The road goes past farmhouses and enviable country homes, cornfields, vegetable gardens, cows and goats grazing in meadows. The other, with gentle slopes, follows the Dordogne in the direction of St-Céré. The river is to one side, forest to the other. It’s the more solitary route of the two. I can make of it what I will: a 10k, 12k, or whatever.

  In the summer of 1986, during a run in Prospect Park one Sunday morning—when the park is closed to traffic—I was struck from behind by a bicyclist zooming along at top speed. I flew into the air and, when I landed, saw that my lower left arm was bent at a very peculiar angle. At the emergency room in a nearby hospital, I found out I’d broken both arms, the left acutely. Even worse, the seriously broken arm was improperly set, so it subsequently had to be rebroken and operated on (for nearly four hours) at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. Yes, suffering has its positive side—or so Mother and church had always affirmed. I always got a seat on the subway. I discovered the generosity of friends and grew to accept dependency.

  When I started to run in France, however, the following fall, I was in a different frame of mind. What if I was struck by an automobile? What if I was knocked unconscious? Who would know who I was, where I was from? I couldn’t shake these troubling thoughts. It occurred to me that it would be wise to carry some sort of identification. Once, during a visit to a monastery in another region, I’d picked up—in an outburst of nostalgia—one of those little Catholic “dog tags,” in green felt, which read IN CASE OF EMERGENCY CALL A PRIEST. I rescued it from the back of the drawer of the bureau, where it had lain forgotten. I crossed out the words a priest and substituted Marius Bézamat and his phone number. I carried it in the pocket of my running pants, and it made all the difference. The vision of myself as a nameless corpse vanished.

  When I returned the following spring, Monsieur Bézamat invited me inside the house—he had something to return to me. There on the table was the little dog tag! Evidently, it had fallen out of my pocket on the road. Monsieur Bézamat explained that the people at the Fénelon in Carennac had phoned him, after someone had brought it to them, and he’d stopped by to fetch it. Monsieur Bézamat, my unsuspecting guardian, looked a little sheepish. I pocketed the tag with some embarrassment. The miracle of its return was reassuring, but it also gave me the creeps. It was as if that little tag possessed some Catholic voodoo that still had a hold on me.

  Each day on my walk/run I see something different: the particular cast of light or configuration of clouds, the sight of a pheasant in flight, the cycle of crops: tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, corn. On this particular morning—it was a warm October in 1993—I began my walk late in the afternoon, on the day before I was to leave for Paris. At a brisk pace, I passed a country house where an elderly gentleman, a baggy figure in bib overalls, was tending his flower garden. Just past the house I approached a field—“corn as high as an elephant’s eye,” I sang to myself—when an enormous German shepherd-like dog, with long spindly legs, bounded from the tall stalks—a blur of fur and bared teeth, sailing through the air in a snarling charge. He hurled himself at my feet and sank his teeth into my left calf, as if it were a pork chop. It happened in a flash, but I had the split-second sinking—and surprisingly clearheaded—realization that I’d be out of commission for any walking or running for a while. Then, shock. I screamed crazily over and over—aieee, aieee, aieee! The dog slunk back and crouched, eyeing me threateningly. My leg was spurting blood, drenching my sock, flowing into my running shoe. I stood tottering, stunned, and, remembering the gardener, started screaming, “Monsieur! Monsieur!”

  Eventually, he heard my shouts. He propped his hoe against a tree and made his way in my direction, with the side-rocking, struggling gait of an elderly, overweight gentleman.

  “Le chien, il est à vous?” I bellowed at him. He shook his head—he didn’t own the dog—stamping his foot and waving his arms to shoo the beast away. Then he came to my side.

  Robust as he was, he only reached my chin. I flung my arm around his shoulders for support—feeling monstrously tall—and he clasped an arm around my waist. We staggered like two drunks back to his garden, where he deposited me in a tiny wrought-iron chair. My screams had subsided into moans. Visibly shaken, he wrung his hands helplessly. I started wailing again—“aieee, un médecin!”—to put fire under him. I felt like a wild raging creature, unable to regain a sense of reason or presence of mind.

  He hurried into the house and quickly returned with some gauze, Band-Aids, a strip of cloth. This was futile. I took a sideways glance at my leg and winced at the alarming brilliant-colored flow of blood still pouring from the punctures.

  Then, somehow, magically, at this moment when the world seemed to have spun to a halt, a woman appeared. She was small, with coal-black hair and a dark complexion, and she was wearing bedroom slippers. Where had she come from? She was a figure of amazing calm, despite my renewed cries now that I had a second party to whom I could wail.

  She and Monsieur had a hurried exchange about what had happened. I detected her French as nonnative. Italian, perhaps, I thought distractedly. Bending down, she told me, in a tone that commanded me to hush, that she would go back for her car and take me to the doctor. She shuffled off, her heelless slippers flapping on the walk. With this, my cries died. I felt drained, oddly bestilled, exhausted. I asked Monsieur—my mind picking at a stray detail—if the woman was Italian.

  “Non, Portuguese,” he said. “Mais une bonne voisine.” But a good neighbor—there it was again—as if to reassure me that her foreignness did not detract from her reliability.

  In a few minutes she was back with a dilapidated small black car. I eased into the front seat, lifting my bad leg with both hands clasped behind the knee. The floor of the car was a clutter of papers, tools, and rags. A thumb-size plastic Virgin was stuck to the dashboard, rosary beads were draped around the rearview mirror, and a pair of broken sunglasses sat in the open ashtray. As we drove off I asked her where she was taking me. To the doctor in Bétaille. Not the emergency room at St-Céré? I pressed her. No, the Bétaille doctor would be best. Was she sure he was there? (This was a Monday.) Yes, he was there. She must have checked. During this limited conversation, I was intrigued by her accent. It suddenly, unaccountably, occurred to me that that’s how foreign I sounded speaking French, when I couldn’t hear the distortion myself.

  She drove into the parking lot across from the bakery and stopped the car. I followed her—she made no attempt to assist me—with mincing limps, to an office at the rear of a building, which also housed a butcher and a small grocery. She rang the bell and the door was instantly opened by the young doctor, outfitted in a crisp white coat and with an expectant expression on his face. Once again, this new candidate for my woes set me off: “un chien méchant” I sobbed. He nodded patiently and guided me, with the sort of upright, confidence-building stance typical of doctors, to the examining table. We established that I was American. (The locals can’t distinguish, of course, between an American or English accent, and since many British have settled in this area, they are usually surprised at my nationality.) “Américaine!” he whispered, as if it were a sacred word. I was probably his first American patient.

  “C’est pas très grave,” he said reassuringly, and told me to lie back so that he could clean and dress the wound. He asked if I had had a tetanus shot. Yes? Then he would give me a painkiller and an antibiotic, and I should see a doctor as soon as I reached Paris, and then my doctor in New York. The Portuguese woman stood patiently to the side, her crossed arms enclosing her cloth sack purse. “Regardez, madame,” the
doctor instructed her, as if she were a medical student, pointing out the position of the gashes on either side of my leg made by the eyeteeth and lower teeth, respectively—“une piqûre classique!” He beamed at me as if I’d earned a merit badge. When he finished, he patted my leg and I sat up, feeling intact again now that I was bandaged. Since I hadn’t brought any money with me, I promised to return and pay him before I left in the morning.

  I hobbled stiffly to the car. It was painful to walk, since the dog’s eyeteeth had penetrated the muscle. On the drive back to my car, Madame told me in no uncertain terms that I should see the people who owned the dog; they were responsible for the doctor’s bill. I dismissed this with a wave of my hand—twenty dollars was the last thing I was concerned about. And anyway, what people? When we reached the car, I thanked her profusely. She had performed the kind service with the unquestioning dutifulness of a soldier. She nodded like a lieutenant dismissing the troops and pulled away.

  I drove directly to the Hirondes. I needed to tell them the time of my departure the next morning, but if the truth be told, I was yearning for some sympathy. Raymond was standing on the porch and looked aghast, just the reaction I wanted, when he saw my bandaged leg and gimpy walk. “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” he wanted to know. When I told him about the dog attack, his lower lip dropped and a blank curtain seemed to fall across his face. For the first time since I’d known him, he was utterly dumbfounded. He waved me inside with an encompassing gesture. “Simone, Simone,” he called helplessly.

  But you must find the owners, she said instantly, stripping herself of her apron as she came from the kitchen. I smelled and heard the sizzle of roasting potatoes. Raymond wagged his head vigorously in agreement. I said that I wouldn’t be able to do that: it was difficult to drive, and where would I begin? Besides, I had to get ready to leave in the morning.

  No, Simone insisted. She would go with me, or Raymond, or both of them. The owners must be found, because—the sticking point—they owed me money for the doctor bill! I said that the twenty dollars was not that important to me—I was still looking for a “poor you” and some coddling. But it was important, they insisted. Raymond said he would get the car and the two of us would go.

  Off we went, to the scene of the crime. The gardener had returned to his pruning. Raymond stopped and got out of the car. The gardener came over and bent down, his ruddy, round face filling the window. I made a little wave—remember me?—and thanked him for all of his help. He tipped his hat and stood back up. Through the open window, I could hear the drift of conversation between the two men.

  Hironde: Do you know whose dog this could be?

  Gardener: No, never seen the dog. Probably a dog from the hunt.

  This was alarming. A hunting dog? I had a horrifying image of diseased fangs, dripping with the blood of wild animals.

  Hironde: What would they have been hunting?

  Gardener: Rabbits, probably.

  Hironde: Not pheasants?

  Thus followed a discussion of the hunt, types of guns, vantage points for various game, and so on. The point of our mission seemed to have been lost.

  Then Hironde: But would it have been a hunting dog? It’s Monday. It’s illegal to hunt on Monday.

  A shrug from the gardener.

  That matter unresolved, they lapsed again into chitchat: offspring, mutual acquaintances. The light of late afternoon was tinted by the sinking red sun. The valley had a hush about it. I gazed out my window. A few cows, drawn to this bewildering human exchange, meandered to the fence by the car. They stood rooted, as if they would remain there until the end of time. I returned their dull-witted stare. The congregations of insects around their eyes—shouldn’t it be madly irritating?—provoked only the merest twitch of an ear or an involuntary ripple of skin. They munched contentedly. The car was warm with the trapped sun. I could hardly keep my eyes open.

  Raymond opened the door and slumped into the front seat. He started the motor but made no move to go forward. He announced that he and the gardener had discussed the prospect of going to the magistrates about the dog. He shook his head at the gravity of such an action. If you go to the magistrates, he said, they might simply shoot the dog. (Not a bad idea, I thought wickedly.) That would be too radical, he said, reading my mind. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel, deep in thought. Ah, he finally exclaimed, tapping his forehead with an index finger, we would pay a visit to his friends who lived in the valley and knew all the goings-on. The man was a former policeman.

  This aroused a spark of energy in me. Our search was taking on aspects of a detective story. We continued along the same road and then turned off along a backcountry lane, eventually winding around to a farmhouse. Out came a robust woman, approaching the car at a near gallop, arms outstretched in a high-spirited greeting to Raymond. She had a halo of thick curly black hair, penetrating blue eyes that sized me up, and a smooth, milk-white complexion unusual in a farm woman. She was more beautiful for being overweight, wonderfully earthy. I felt diminished by her. She swept us into the house, where we sat at the wooden kitchen table as she poured a rough red wine from a labelless bottle. Immediately, we were joined by her husband, who was as pale and sickly as she was robust and healthy. He was thin to the point of emaciation, his shoulders hunched as if he were in constant pain. His face was craggy and weathered. A wan smile revealed teeth like a decaying picket fence. He sat in a chair near the fireplace, his arms draped languidly over the chair arms with his wrists dangling lifelessly. I wondered if he was seriously ill.

  When she heard the story, Madame assured me that country farm dogs were trained to bark and to defend their territory if provoked, but would never attack outright. What did this dog look like? I mentioned its color and size and had hardly gotten the words out when Madame boomed, “Aha!” That monster had gone after her on her vélo—bike—and she’d barely managed to escape. Then she emitted a bellow of triumph: my brother-in-law’s dog! She pounded the table victoriously with a fist. Madame said that she’d warned her brother-in-law time and again that the dog was a no-good rascal. We must pay him a visit, she insisted, running her hands through her hair as if to tame her exasperation. He owed me the money for the doctor bill!

  I must have looked completely startled—she halted in the midst of her outburst when she saw my reaction. I was startled—not so much that this was her brother-in-law’s dog, but that she’d admitted to it. Apparently, the dog’s attack would be more fuel for the fire of a longstanding feud with her brother-in-law. I glanced at her husband, who had lit a cigarette and was dragging on it despondently. For a policeman, he had a curious lack of interest in the case. The energy for any fight seemed to have been sapped from him.

  Raymond and I walked back to the car. Dusk was setting in and I was beginning to feel the pangs of hunger. Yet events were moving along inexorably. Though we didn’t speak of it, Raymond and I were now in collusion, bound to see this through. We drove a short distance to the farmhouse of the brother-in-law.

  Raymond suggested I wait in the car. Presumably, he felt it best for him to approach the people with what had to be a rather delicate matter. To relieve my anxiety, I perused a scruffy paperback guide to mushrooms I discovered in the glove compartment. A good twenty minutes passed. Then Raymond rapped on the window and gestured for me to follow him. I was extremely nervous, not only in the role of accuser, but in having to confront the vicious dog. We passed through the barnyard to a shed, where a portly gentleman with a rubbery red face and scrambled bristly hair stood with a bird-boned woman half his size, whom I took to be his wife. She was that lusty woman’s sister? Raymond gestured to me with upturned palm—my American neighbor—as if serving me up. They seemed congenial enough, but something—their nonchalance and placidity—made me vaguely distrustful. We walked to the shed and there, secured with a heavy chain to a post and lying with his giant head resting on his great outstretched paws—looking for all the world like a repentant criminal—was the dog. I nodded and said
, chalkily, to Raymond, “C’est le chien.”

  The man asked what the doctor’s fee was, without a word of apology for their dog’s behavior or inquiry as to my well-being. He withdrew a hundred-franc bill from the wallet in his pants pocket and, folding it twice over as if to make it vanish, slipped it to me, as if we were in some sort of conspiracy. He said—as if to assuage some guilt I might feel—that they would be reimbursed by their insurance company. The whole discussion left me feeling off-kilter; I had the unreasonable sensation that perhaps I was culpable.

  Suddenly, unbidden, the woman announced that she had driven up to my house with the Portuguese woman. They’d not found me at home, she said tartly. Perversely, I suspected that it was more the tenacity of the Portuguese woman to see that I was repaid than an act of kindness on this woman’s part. But I was mystified nonetheless.

  How did they know where I lived? I asked her.

  She drew her shoulders up to her ears and pouted, with an expression that said I was asking the obvious. Well, the American with the house on the hill … It was not the first time I’d discovered myself to be a well-known figure, when I assumed I was anonymous.

  As we climbed back into the car Raymond turned to me and shuddered. “Il est vraiment un grand chien!” he said. I swelled, the heroine (as if I’d overcome the beast). “Oui,” I said boastfully. I commented that the couple had seemed cooperative enough. He confided that they were in some debt to him (how I relished this intrigue). When they’d had some money problems he’d bailed them out. In fact, their farm was now for sale. Did I have any American friends who would be interested?