Two years ago, before I returned for a visit to Australia, I hugged Irène farewell. Unexpectedly she had said,
‘Je vous invitez chez moi, en Corse. These aren’t just empty words, Freya…. I’d like you to spend September with me there, at our house. You’ll be smitten by Corsica! You and Loup should both come.’
Irène had paused and added, ‘It might be my last time there.’
Sacha cautioned, ‘you won’t ever want to leave, Frey… once you’ve seen La Corse, you’ve seen the world’.
Now, a year and a half later, I am longing to visit my old friend. It‘s an excursion that will take an entire day: I plan my route with some apprehension. Nervously, I devour the maps, and choose the lesser roads, right from the sortie of our hideaway, to the entrée of the old Mediterranean port of La Ciotat. Three hours of my private Tour de France. Pascal, you can stay behind. Please, go back to your clouds. Laze with a lizard on a rock, or run with the wolves. Courir avec Loup. But leave me alone so I can enjoy my drive with my new Michelin map, and my music. I don’t need you beside me.
There is nothing ugly along the way, unless you consider the 300-metre-tall chimney of the coal-powered electricity station at Gardanne, to be ugly. From a distance, its spire is an arresting counterpoint to the landscape. Splicing the sky, it takes your eye straight up to the chalk-white massif of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which hovers above, the mirage of a colossal ship, released from its earthly moorings. Everything below, man-made or otherwise, diminishes as if underwater. Even the power station.
My minor itinerary is thrilling. The adventure begins as soon as my tiny voiture crawls out of our cul de sac, crosses the canal and encounters bitumen for half a kilometre, turning before the industrial estate, to re-enter the dirt, again cross the canal, winding past the new Mas, turning left at the imposing chateau and olive groves of Éloise, and traversing a vineyard on what is no wider than a donkey trail. I can hear the thrumming on the main road, but stick to the dirt. The hot air now smells of tilled earth and horse manure, not our own merde. I pass two donkeys who come to my window; I stop and say Bonjour and Merci. Bon après-midi, to the rollicking goats.
Soon I find myself under the vertiginous arched bridge of the Aqueduc de Roquefavour, spanning a chasm between cliffs of lichen and moss. Then it’s a scramble of webbed detours to avoid the Auto-Routes and the round-about where the infamous putes and prostitutes loiter, and then with relief, climbing aside the forest of Mimet, dropping down to Peypin, and then sighting the lonely landmark of Auriol, La Chapelle de Sainte-Croix. Where, as a new wife in this new land I used to climb; huddled against its centuries-old worn stone, I would observe my new hometown below, as she slowly shed her winter cloak of strangeness.
Beyond Auriol my journey takes me higher into nostalgic territory. Landscape that I once learned by heart, treading miles of trails until I belonged to my first French home. And she belonged to me. Bypassing the commerce of Aubagne, dwarfed by the bulbous bluff of La Sainte Baume, my tiny car ascends the sinuous circuit de Castellet, adrenalin rising to meet the kamikaze of crazy motorcycles and sickening S-bends. An unexpected present in my belle-soeur’s letterbox from my daughter, The National ‘High Violet’ is blaring out on the car CD player, and the mistral cannot catch me.
‘It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders…It’s a terrible love and I’m walking in…’
Singing aloud, victorious. My phobia of spiders cured by the hut. Like the knowledge imparted by the gales at Discovery Bay, I imagine I am somehow improved by the mistral, by the smell of our merde, by the ugly hut, by the spiders. By solitude. By necessity.
Passing through the picture-perfect Gémenos, higher up through the forest and limestone paths of pilgrims down to the charmed Ceyreste, the ball of sun bouncing off the Mediterranean below. Silver glazes the windscreen.
Overpowering the sea is a dinosaur’s hump, Le Mugel, against whose rock and shadows, loom the iconic monoliths of La Ciotat. These are the remnant towering cranes of the shipbuilding port; Jurassic insects laying claim to their entitlement. This is still their town. The Autoroute journey would have lasted exactly half this time. But so would have the intrigue. There would have been no grace for alteration, no grafting into me from the journey.
My friend Irène lives in the older quarter of là vieux ville, the high stonewalls and bougainvillea protecting its charm from gangs of mopeds and all-night beach discos. I buzz at the elaborate gates, as I have so many times before, but this time Irma’s shutters are closed, and I can’t see her potted geraniums, or the gerberas that I’d given her, or her colourful paper lanterns hanging from the giant plane tree. The house and courtyard hunker, bereft. Neither Irène’s landline nor mobile are working.
I push aside a feeling of dread, telling myself that Irène and Sacha have probably gone to Corsica early this year. But then the gates slowly swing open, as the neighbour arrives in her Peugeot cabriolet, sunroof open. She lives in the huge house across the courtyard, happens to share the same surname as Irène, but as Loup observes, little else.
‘Excusez-moi Madame, I’m looking for Irène’, I say in a small voice, suddenly uncertain.
‘Ah, you don’t know? Irène has left us. Il y’avait deux semaines. Since two weeks.’
I knew that when the French say ‘Elle nous a quittés’- it’s like our way of saying - she has departed, passed on. So the truth was, Irène had gone much further than Corsica. The neighbour went on to explain that Irène had parted ‘brutalement’. She watches as the word stuns me.
The picture of Irène dying a brutal death is unbearable. But I discover that the French adverb here meant ‘sudden and quick’. Not violent for Irène herself, only for those around her. For Sacha. Slumped back in my car, unable to stop the tears, I berate myself: why hadn’t I come two week earlier? Pissed off for being a coward with the roads, I take the very long way home that night. And wondered why the shock of losing Irène was so profound…? Should I feel guilty that I had formed such a quick and deep attachment for a woman who was practically a stranger? Had I neglected my own mother, whom I was always deserting for another country? I can only trust that Irène knew I adored her. And that my own mother knows that without her insight, her example, her modest constant light, my bobbing dinghy-life would have floundered long ago. Arriving back at the hut very late, and waking up Loup to tell him, it feels as if everything we touch turns sour. Not just our milk that turns yellow and lumpy without a fridge and every second day must be thrown out. Every single thing we touch, se degrader.
Loup doesn’t easily express emotion, but I know that he and Irène shared a rare closeness; flirting because they could, playing with imagined ‘what if's’. And it is only thanks to Loup, that I gained Irene’s friendship. We are silenced; we do not know how to comfort each other. My devastation is deeper than I can fathom. But then, so is everything else about this place.
It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders…
Loup is submerged under his correspondence, his calculations, and another grieving. He is hounded by threats from the tax department, from sub-contractors, from suppliers, from debt-collectors; dealing with clients who won’t pay, tenants who won’t pay, and above all, a dishonest and corrupt construction milieu with, as he says, their hands and balls tied by the mafia. Night after night, weekend after weekend, Loup recounts his tedious battles, yells and screams on the phone, sweating conscientiously to honour his dues. It is only after exhausting every avenue to redeem his company and his staff that he surrenders himself to legal administration for all of the above.
In the glower of his crisis, my loneliness is a petty indulgence. Loup buries himself further into his registered letters, pleading clemency to a system that knows not his name nor his cause, and I bury myself further into my maps. I help by listening. I listen to Loup and dig and scurry and bury. I chide Pascal.
Pascal, did you take the byways? I never really knew that much about you. But you did have an old
4-wheel-drive, and we did once visit a tic-infested ruin in a humid valley in Les Vosges, where you had abandoned an old bulldozer, embedded in mud. We got the picture that perhaps you too had a passion for lost corners. In your hoard of stuff, we found a bundle of maps. Unbeknown to Loup, I have kept them all, savouring in secret the random places you had circled in fading red or green ink. Or, were these the clandestine destinations of your mysterious father; his far-flung boltholes? I try to thread your journeys together. But Loup tells me that you never ventured much farther than your native Alsace. Not until that one Christmas when we trespassed together in the blue Yarra ranges, and later you went on your own outback adventure, the tales of which we can only invent.
Fucksake leave me be Pascal! Irritated now by the constant wondering. As if that’s going to bring vivid life back. Or make the hut more agreeable. Or lessen the burden on Loup. I boil water and tidy and re-tidy our boxes, sweep the ants and crush the cockroaches. Slam the shutters shut against the mistral and the heat. But I am defeated. It is 39 degrees inside, and 43 out.
Like a limpet I attach myself to France Inter and wait for each day to end. For the ritual rumble of Loup’s tyres upon the stones as they deafen the radio; luring me out to the crépuscule twilight, to once again sit on our stack of timber palettes, drink cheap Côte de Rhone rosé and inhale the lilac mirage of Les Alpilles.
Pascal and the Angel, Rue des Peupliers, June 2009.
“She was doubly blind, not only stone but unendowed with even the pretence of sight.”
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel.
You cannot tell if your breath is your own. Perhaps it is the onlooker, the angel behind you with the broken wing, who forces your lungs to expand and inhale the bad air inside the black sack. As if they belong to someone else, these flaccid lungs, coerced to “Breathe in 1,2,3,… Breathe out 1,2,3,…” into the fusty hollow. The cloth cloys at your cheeks like cling wrap. Clutching cold metal against your clammy face, you trust your trembling hand to guide your faux-ami inside the sack. You feel certain in your calm, because you have all the reasons written out in your cramped precise style, on paper in your backpack. You have named names… And this is the lie that convinces you. And anyway, what would she know, that benign angel, about breathing, about the pounding chest clawing downwards. Deep-down inside your twisting bowels, to thrust out your last breath. What would she know? Why doesn’t she stop you?
She’s made of stone.
What would she fucking know…. about the foul spectre of self-loathing that terrorised you out into the night to do something only the devil could invent?
The memory is back. In fact I invited it. We are not done yet. There are more questions; là casse-couilles will not rest. Fear not Pascal, for these small reckonings are directed as much to myself as to you. And I have a thing or two to sort out with your Angel.
The one that did nothing.
Your memory sits large at our old Ikea table, obscuring the harsh slats of sun through broken shutters, and I am thankful to have it there. If I learn to love the memory, (love it like the hut, the merde, like France herself), it will love me back, and Loup and I will be able to make plans again, and not forever think of ourselves as losers. This is the settlement I sell myself.
Pascal, my beau-frère. It is a lovely accord with the French language, that my brother-in-law is indeed beau. Just like Loup.
Whilst my eyes are wide-open, Loup sleeps. He has had his share of ambushed nights. He moans and snores and farts and chews; grinding his teeth. Why doesn’t his teeth grinding wake him? Happily, Loup has found a way of venting; unencumbered by the process. Upon going to bed, my husband will say,
“Nite nite chérie, it’s time to nique Morphée”, meaning that he’s off to shag the night fairy, the ancient Greek goddess of dreaming, of pain killing. Pascal had stolen that beguiling daughter of Morpheus from his little brother. But now Loup has her back. Promoting his mode de vie, levity, Loup insists
‘Chérie,why don’t you listen to Rire et Chanson - laughter and song - instead of your France Inter? I’d be already hanging off the bridge if I inhabited your head.’
Like his hero Robert Benigni in Life is Beautiful, Loup can turn everything into a joke. Yes, two years later in La Ciotat, Loup would find a darkly comic angle to all of this. Will Pascal get the joke? Evidently Loup and he have an on-going understanding. Besides the La Ciotat period was all about assimilating the grief with the appalling truth. The plain ugly facts dressed up as noble vérité. In La Ciotat we carved out culpability whilst it in turn gnawed away at our certitude, leaving gaping holes. Nothing was as it should be. Thank Christ for the sea.
So here I sit. Far from that sea. Surrounded by our boxes; my maps are neatly folded on one corner of the same white Ikea table where once my fabrics formed layers of love hearts and the words of the Gendarmes pierced the morning air.
I had written to you Pascal, from this Ikea table in Auriol. With Loup’s help, offering you my espérance and optimisme, but never heard back. Why not Pascal? How far away you were from us, already. The act upon the lighthouse: your practice-run. But I refused to believe that there was nothing we could do. How could it be right to just stay here, at the far end of France from you, and not come to seeyou? To coax you down from that crane, where you considered throwing yourself off, more than once. But I had been your brother’s wife for a mere five months. So how could I know anything of you and your family? Or disregard their embarrassment and resistance to let me visit you.
Why couldn’t you wait for your family to come? Why deny those who met you, the opportunity to get to know you, you shone your light so briefly in our lives. Pascal, you were the candle in the wind for my friends and family. You cultivated love without realising it. You were luminous.
And what’s more, you and Loup could be mistaken for twins. That’s why; despite your petit-frère looking dashing with a beard, your sisters and I cringe, the resemblance is just too striking. Once, when Loup returned from one of many workouts resurrecting your house in Strasbourg, it was as if he were cloaked in your skin. It was terrible. I had to ask him to get rid of that beard. Moreover, he had gained weight in the face, so that his angular cheeks appropriated the roundness of yours.
Our fervent reunion was disturbing, until I was able to simply focus on Loup’s eyes, his smell. The chemistry of our skin finally proving that he was indeed my Loup, and not your double, Pascal. Were you and your little brother showing off, mimicking each other in that other language of your German father in which you feel at home, playing the doppelgänger? There have been bleak times, when you have invaded and inhabited your brother; dragging him down that road of abomination. Down until he was grim beyond reach. Dark and contorted like the iron you once forged. Pascal please do not mess with him again. No don’t you dare.
Alsacienne Angel, Rue de la Fabrique.
To get to know you Pascal, may I start with your Alsacienne angel? I believe she was the last to see you. When I first notice her, Loup your family and I, are united in Strasbourg for the second time. For the continuation of the big clean. The big clean that will take seven years of summer holidays and Christmases. I am taking a break whilst the others discuss private matters. Jogging alongside the green river between its shadow-wet and the dry-stone wall, exploring your city of bike-trails, forest-parks, canals and medieval laneways, of street prostitutes and soaring cathedrals. That’s how it strikes me Pascal, your Strasbourg, cradle of exemplary highs and dastardly lows. A city whose inhabitants have fought a bitter war and been betrayed, now pedal their upright bikes to the boulangerie in peace, asking for pretzels and pain de chocolat in Alsacienne, their heads held high.
“Guetemorje, ich mecht zwei bratstale und zwei chokolade weke? Merci, geuter da”.
Their round faces greet the good morning, anticipating the warm salty-sweet-chocolate-pastry melting. Claude, your jovial brother-in-law who lifts weights now that he is no longer in the army, and pads around the apartment where we all bun
k down in his socks and undies, his arms the thickness of Odette’s waist; he has drawn me a mud map, so that in one fell swoop, I admire the lofty excellence of the Court of Human Rights, and then hit the ground running, amongst a bevy of long-legged pert-arsed-putes, parading their own brand of human rights. But on this steamy day when the air paws at my skin, I don’t really give a damn about their fleshy cheek.
Your angel winks at me sideways over the high stonewall, and I wonder how do I get to meet her up front? Her strong wing is arched against you, as if in readiness to take flight, but her gaze is fixed upon her charges below. How well did you know this angel, Pascal? Did you go there often to sit on your favourite bench, with the children’s swings and slides on your right, and the florist where mourners can buy flowers on your left, and the lazy flow of the deep l’Ill in front of you, and your mysterious guardian with the moss-green toe-nails watching sidelong over your shoulder? Did you feed the white swans? Or did you summon macabre thoughts about what lay between the paths neatly hedged behind your angel?
Perhaps you drifted back with aching to the long grass under the weeping willows, where as boys, you and Loup used to fish for what seemed like hours, your lines bobbing in the green river, competing furiously as to who would catch the most Gardon. And how, cradling those silvery fish with their orange gills gulping, you would tear home with your own small hearts racing, and offer up your precious catch, impatient to impress your parents? Whose dull indifference would wound you all over again?
Or Pascal, with the encouragement of your one-winged friend, did you put to rest the rumours about never having ‘a proper girlfriend’? Perhaps you met a lady there on that bench, shyly asking her to walk a way with you, down across the wooden bridge, then around past your old turreted École de là Robertsau, past the stone church with the needle spire, Saint-Fiacre past the low log house with the heart-shaped-holes in their claret shutters, winding alongside the noble homes and rose gardens of Rue du Docteur François, then stopping abruptly at the kindergarten playground, where verses from Jean de la Fontaine are etched in the low modern windows, on the cusp of Là Wantzenau. Your lady friend is enchanted by the old fables, but this uninvited moment is too intimate for you Pascal, and you stumble over your words, inventing a clear get-away excuse. Having almost sung like the cricket, you ignore Fontaine’s urge to ‘Dansez maintenant’. You reject happiness. And leave her there with the La Cigale and the Ant. So you would never have to explain your booby-trapped house.
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