A bird on every tree
Page 7
Inside the grim little hotel was equally sweltering. Queuing for the toilet she let others go ahead of her—pity those weak-bladders; don’t cause a stir, even when entitled to. She imagined Em doing a pee dance, how she would have charged ahead.
Relief that the stop wasn’t overnight buzzed up and down the following queue, a line-up for the dining room, a space partially redeemed by its view. Rooftops spread below, the colour of sundried tomatoes in a deep green bowl, the surrounding hills under a yellow haze. Fanning herself—her brochure flashing pictures of azure skies—a woman nudged Arlene. “Y’all travelling by your lonesome? We’re stuck here for sank hours—we’re paying for this?”
Salad was all the buffet offered by the time a spot came available, next to the fellow who’d spoken on the bus. Sipping wine, he was fiddling with an expensive-looking camera. Nice hands, she thought, even if they showed a certain hesitance. His crisp outdoor adventure–style clothes seemed at odds with the walker. A wife, a partner to match would soon appear? But patting the plastic seat—“It’s got your name on it”—he flagged someone down to bring more water.
Hennigan was his name, Michael. He came from Toronto, she heard, helping herself to the last croissant in its plastic basket. His forthrightness was cheering. It made her think of someone back home, a professor who taught a course having to do with Pavlov’s dogs. Typing up his memos, her interest wasn’t necessarily feigned.
“Don’t know about you, but I’m here to get healed.” Hennigan grinned as he spoke. His laugh was robust. “Dessert?” Before she could offer to go for some, leaving his camera and pristine-looking daypack, maneuvering the walker, he returned with two acid-yellow tarts. While she was getting coffee the driver appeared and shouted mostly in French. The bus had a problem, a mechanical issue, it seemed. Not to worry, a replacement was being found, though their ETA in the Dordogne would be delayed: “À huit heures, at the latest.” Up went a solitary cheer—“More time to visit Our Lady!”—the rest of the announcement drowned out by groans.
“Quelle surprise.” Hennigan made her think again of the Pavlovian, who’d been making noises recently about dinner at the faculty club. “Sorry—I didn’t catch your name,” he said, though she was sure she’d told him. Offering his hand, he gave hers a businesslike grip. She repeated her name, her married one—Deveau—kept for Em’s sake, she explained, and no, she didn’t speak French but wished she could; a little embarrassed, not wanting to seem stupid, she didn’t explain.
“So you have a daughter.” His smile was quizzical, touchingly so. “You miss her?”
“Just a bit.” She made a point of ignoring the walker, its flipped-down seat shelving his belongings. Its metallic red seemed better suited to a muscle car. Only his thinness—accentuated by his greying hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and wrinkle-free pants—and the hint of a tremor in his hands suggested infirmity. He was clearly travelling alone, and not averse to visiting this tourist trap, angling for help? It crossed her mind.
Outside, the bus sat with its engine off. Hennigan looped his camera strap over his head. Dizzying sunlight bounced from clay and stucco. She pressed her palm against the hotel’s prickly shaded wall, savouring an illusion of coolness. A minor glitch, this; soon they’d be underway—though in just two days her flight home left Paris. The thought made her queasy again; she wasn’t the most adventurous traveller. But the dancing brightness flooded the street swarming with visitors and, washing cloudless blue and the Pyrenées’s snowy peaks in its glow, snubbed her worries.
“Up for a hike?” Hennigan eyed her dressy sandals. Her running shoes were stowed, naturally, deep aboard the bus. They wouldn’t be going far, it seemed fairly obvious.
“As long as we stick to the streets.”
In the distance below, a dull green river threaded past clustered buildings. High on a hill beyond it, some ruins—a castle, some ancient fortification?—blended mirage-like with their rocky perch. She could already feel a blister starting, but the sight took her mind off it. The ruins reminded her of Em, tiny Em playing a fairy princess, her daddy’s little girl.
Busily snapping photos, Hennigan was unaccountably spry. The steep little street soon gave way to a human river sweeping them along. Exactly what she’d vowed never to do after the divorce: let herself be swept up or steered. She could’ve stayed at the hotel to nurse a drink; wasn’t that the trouble with travelling alone, the possibility of multiple choices? Not that having too many choices was a problem. While flying across the ocean, flying into the sun, loneliness had pricked her, not out of missing Em but, unaccountably, her ex. A reflex, the psych professor would’ve said; and nothing a miniature bottle of wine didn’t ease.
Just as soothing, if not exactly comforting, was how well Hennigan knew his way. Not that a person could get badly lost here: the pluses of a hilly place, so many vantage points. Her toe started to ooze, but forgetting it, forgetting herself, she pointed out a spire jutting above the rooftops. Hennigan set the walker’s brakes while he focused his lens.
At the foot of the hill the streets were a warren clogged with sightseers. Dusty shop-fronts teemed with souvenirs—crucifixes, figurines of Virgin Mary and a little grey nun that made Arlene think of a toy penguin Em had cherished. Cramming the windows with a dreary repetition, so many tiny hands clasped in prayer, the miniature nuns cast pious eyes upwards. Little Saint Bernadette, said cardboard signs penned in English, patron of the hopelessly ill.
Her toe was now bleeding. Hennigan pressed on, his tanned face a bit flushed, the limp that she’d soon noticed only slightly pronounced. “Pauvre petite Bernadette,”—he patted his chest, grimacing good-naturedly—“see what happens when the capitalist spirit runs amok?”
“And isn’t religion just that, exploiting the lame?” Even if rehearsed, more or less the professor’s view, it came out rather harshly, no hope of being retracted.
“No one does kitsch better than Cat’licks.”
Rummaging for her phone—curse this oversized purse—she went to take a picture. Em would approve. But it was dead, the charger packed with her sneakers, of course. She had to hurry to catch up, red smearing her sandal strap. Hennigan was mopping his temples, which offered some satisfaction. “You know exactly where you’re going, I take it.” She didn’t mean to sound sarcastic.
He’d been here before, oh yes, years ago, with his wife who had died—died much too young, he said, eyeing her—of cancer. Looking away politely, she fixed on the crowds pushing past. “It happened after I was diagnosed myself. With MS, multiple sclerosis.” His voice was matter-of-fact, as if he knew what she was thinking: false hope, the last resort of those desperate and crazy enough to come to such places seeking “cures.” Hype and hocus-pocus, the weak being preyed on because of their faith. Following a god that heaped suffering on suffering, the reward for faith more suffering—what could be more foolish? Drooling dogs pressing keys in order to get fed, learned behaviour a reflex: this made sense.
“My illness? No big deal, till lately,” Hennigan said, as if he owed her the explanation. “A bit of a limp, a little numbness was all.”
Her smile was meant to be encouraging, if a bit disengaged. Grit from the cobbles worsened her own complaint, the blister a tiny misery. Be grateful, she told herself, and of course she was.
“At least the souvenirs are from China and not pieces of saints.”
“Relics? You’d take plastic over the real thing? That Catholic penchant for cadaverous tissue. Squeamish, are we?”
“Dead bones and skin—they’re supposed to prove something? I can’t think what. Isn’t it all a little”—she searched for the prof’s word, the correct one—“anthropophagic?”
“Like saying someone’s a little pregnant?” Hennigan laughed, clearly enjoying this—though he leaned on the walker, less an accessory now than a necessity? “A priest I know buys relics on eBay. His mission, rescuing them from profiteers.”
/> “Cannibal collectors?” A bad joke, which she regretted.
“You’ve been to Italy? Something we saw in a cathedral, once—my wife and I. An entire skeleton in a tiny glass casket like Snow White’s.”
“How tiny?” It was what Em would’ve asked.
“Jewelry box–size, maybe. A feat of compression, I’m telling you.”
“Whose, um, was it? Not that it matters.”
“Saint Clement’s maybe? Or just some guy’s. Lost to me now, I’m afraid. At the time we hardly cared.” His smile was half embarrassed, yet in the heat it shimmered the way the streets did—streets such a maze that the two of them could’ve been lab rats.
Petering out, the shops gave onto a plaza crowded with people. A rushing sound rose above their thrum, and beyond a motorcade of wheelchairs Arlene glimpsed glinting green and a bridge bleached white by the glare. Crossing it, they dodged a multitude limping along on crutches and conveyances as spiffy as the Mars Rover. The able-bodied plunged past: nuns in Nikes, couples spearing their way along with Nordic hiking poles. Speed-walkers and cripples alike, humanity log-jammed then spilled around a diapered man lying on the cobbles, his grotesquely clubbed foot on display. She looked gently past the outstretched arm, the empty cup.
Hennigan eyed the sluicing current. “I mean to put that off as long as possible.” He could’ve meant anything by it: taking the future into his hands and leaping, or stooping to some vague yet certain indignity? Reasserting itself, her queasiness must have shown. “You’re a long way from Nova Scotia. What really brings you here?” His voice was earnest, but his eyes were teasing. “Not to France, but this holiest of places.”
“My sub-par French?” She imagined Em elbowing her. Don’t be so fucking lame. “An accident, trust me—nothing more. Next time I’ll—” Be up-front, forthright, especially around believers: fanatics, the ignorant, the professor said, had ways of ganging up. Not that Hennigan struck her as being either—a bit presumptuous maybe, but gently so. As for belief, the only time in her life she’d even imagined praying was at the end of the marriage, and then mainly for Em’s sake.
A boy with a snake tattoo squeezed by, and she pictured the barbed wire bracelet inked around her daughter’s wrist.
“I’ll admit, there can be something off-putting about all this. People in such need.” Hennigan slung his pack over his shoulder, wincing. “I know none of it makes much sense. Time to sit, I’m afraid.” Perched on his movable seat, he mimicked a couple of old men seated on a bench, canes hooked over their knees. Yet his languor seemed youthful, only his eyes restless: the spirit was willing, the flesh weak? The tarted-up walker reminded her of a car her ex might still hanker for—not the professor, though, who drove a Smart Fortwo. His anti-Popemobile, he called it.
Ahead loomed the cathedral, appearing more monolithic than in the guidebook. A slight breeze riffled the hair on people’s heads. “I don’t want to hold you up.” Hennigan’s look was shy now, wary; a stranger’s after all. Abruptly he stood. “Good of you to come—I’ve enjoyed the company.” From someone else—the professor? her ex?—it would’ve sounded wheedling or resentful. But his face had a lambency, his words a sincerity that made her feel obliged to linger, and, wordlessly, to follow.
Beyond the cathedral a fresh throng gathered. As they approached, a hush fell. Swallows darted and dove. Through the crush Arlene spotted the cavern—the grotto at the centre of all the fuss—its shadows lit by flickering candles. “You’re right. This is crazy. But here we are,” Hennigan breathed, “the faithful gathered.” Peering over a thicket of shoulders, she glimpsed a priest raising something—the communion host—and gazing down from a stony ledge, a blue-robed statue of Christ’s mother. Que soy era Immaculada Conceptiou, said a plaque entwined with roses—the bush that had supposedly sprung from rock, the guidebook said, where Bernadette saw the Virgin’s apparition. “Not two or three, but eighteen times,” marvelled Hennigan. “Imagine.”
A carillon muted the priest’s intonations, intonations about Christ’s body and blood, that fixation on flesh. Flames danced palely. Pilgrims groped and kissed the cavern’s blackened walls. Drifting incense recalled the scent of wisteria in the rain—the way Paris smelled when she and her ex had visited it, not long before Em was conceived. A mature, vivacious blonde in a sheer red dress pressed toward them, thalidomide flippers dangling from her filmy little sleeves. Sunlight bounced from the gold cross swinging from a chain around her neck. “Same age as my wife, a child of the sixties—like yourself?” Hennigan nudged her. “How’s that for the power of presumption?” He insisted that she call him Michael.
She glanced down at her toe; by now it was rubbed raw, all but numb. When she looked up again, she’d lost sight of him. Then there he was, closer to the river’s edge, lowering himself sedately to a bench conspicuously vacant. She could have pretended not to see him, could have taken the chance to detach herself and escape. But he waved, tapping the seat beside him.
Perspiring and thirsty she sat, worrying her skirt’s limp linen over her knees, dying to take off her sandal. But an awkward propriety prevented her. The strange, unsettling fragrance—incense—insinuated itself again; less the scent of wisteria than of carnations, or the disinfectant sprayed against fleas in animal labs?
Silently they watched an obese woman trying to raise herself from a wheelchair as a man cheered her on; it was as if the woman had all of eternity to rise and walk. “‘Love isn’t impatient or unkind.’” Hennigan’s smile was wan.
“It’d be hell—” She caught herself, not quite in time.
“Being a cripple?” He drew in the walker to let a couple pass; they held hands, riding by on their motorized scooters.
“What God’s brought together may no one put asunder.” A line you could have fun with. She couldn’t help its sarcastic lilt.
He cleared his throat repeatedly, part of his condition? “If you’ve had enough it’s understandable.” He produced a leaflet. Mass times, she glimpsed with amusement and alarm. Yet she stayed put, out of politeness, regret? Summoning things she’d seen on TV about MS—a new therapy in Italy—she let the clanging of bells hold her there.
Brushing dust from his pants, he arose, leaning less heavily on the aid. His face was creased yet handsome, unlike the professor’s, whose receding hairline, hopeful mullet, and sharp eyes gave him a greedy look. Compared to his sloping ones, Hennigan’s shoulders were ropy, his polo shirt a mauvy pink that neither prof nor ex would’ve been caught dead in. Carefully he unfolded a map picturing the bone-white basilica set against an impossible blue. A perfect stranger still, though already they’d spent much of the day together, if you could consider togetherness to be moving among the faceless devout—the devote, as people called their religious relatives in obituaries back home. Devoted to hopeless hope, addicted was more like it. But who didn’t hope for something?
Her blister had crusted over. But a fresh irritation chafed her, dismay—disgust—at herself for not moving off on her own.
“If you could have one thing, Arlene, what would it be?” Amid the bells’ pealing his question lit like a fly. Old women trudged past bearing candles, the type reserved for power outages. For no good reason she pictured Em alone in the dark with her iPod.
“To be in Font-de-Gaume—Fahdegome?—seeing the caves there, the prehistoric art. Short of visiting Lascaux, which they’ve closed. I’m sorry. Look, I’m keeping you—really—from your mission.” That word stuffed with corporate purpose: crusades, high-minded and bloodily self-serving, and at their heart, a deadly self-righteousness. Worse than the absence of any god, as far as she could see, was human messiness, the failure of any system to temper it.
“Not a bit. You’re not keeping me from anything. The trip certainly doesn’t end here.” He spoke brusquely but his look was open-ended.
The only explanation for behaviour, the professor said, was behaviour itself.
“Like blood from a stone, and smoke from a fire?” She was thinking of artists tens of thousands of years ago drawing pictures of animals using burnt and bloodied sticks.
A girl Em’s age stalking past on metal crutches brought her back. The woman next to her—her mother?—was praying aloud: Walk, ye sinners, walk; for whosoever shall walk in my light will be saved. Arlene imagined the professor groaning. Yet in her mind a chorus sang, voices like Em’s, off-key, and the sound fanned a strange heat through her. The sun was merciless, yet she felt a need to hoard something of it—beyond its fierceness, some vestige of pride? Because a charge of pilgrims was sweeping them toward a wall, its mossy stones fitted with water taps. Hennigan moved with a mute grace, the walker skimming the cobbles.
Joining a queue, he produced a tiny flask from his pack. Disgusted with herself, she dug fruitlessly through her purse—any bottle would do. She watched people stoop to drink, some nursing from the spigots like infants, others cupping palms, careful not to spill a drop. Youths filled wineskins, an elderly couple two large pop bottles. As if surrounded by desert, Hennigan bent and splashed his face and the crown of his head, slapped water on wrists and forearms, and all she could think of was bacteria: germs and all the world’s tiny, lethal hazards. He seemed careful not to drink.
Miracle water—Miracle Whip? The same idea. “Liberation therapy” was the “miracle” procedure MS-sufferers underwent, thanks to some Italian, to clear arteries to the brain. The jugular? Going for the jugular was what her ex once accused her of doing, Em just a toddler the first time he disappeared.