I followed the river out of town until I lost sight of it. I climbed the road that wound up the side of the mountain. And then in my mirror the wide valley and the river were splayed out again.
My breath had quickened and I was beginning to sweat. At the top, on the plateau, I turned left, away from the single-lane road flecked with sheep droppings that led to the house where once, thirteen years before, Claire and I had stayed.
The nearest village sat on top of the mountain three kilometers away. Undoubtedly a place of significance once, with fortified walls built straight into the mountainside and long views of the valley. Though by now irremediably shrunken, several sizes too small for its own history, its constituent parts reduced to an épicerie with a FERMÉ sign hanging on its glass door, an auberge with eight rooms, and a pack of scrawny dogs who began barking at the sight of my car. There wasn’t even a café.
I parked in the tiny square beneath a brutally pruned chestnut tree and entered the Auberge du Soleil.
Behind the desk, leaning on it as though for support, stood a solidly built old man. He straightened up when he saw me.
“Monsieur, bonsoir.”
My French was halting at best. I asked for a room.
I was in luck, I understood him to say. Usually this time of year there were no vacancies. But a cancellation had opened a room. One of the better ones. Avec la vue, he said, though the price was of course reasonable. And might he ask for how long I would be staying?
I said I didn’t know. Exhaustion was taking over; it was difficult to speak any language. When he took my credit card he inquired whether I had ever been to the region before. Once, I mumbled, a long time ago. He waited for me to say more, but I shook my head and opened my hands in a helpless gesture, and on a chair nearby a gray scruffy dog woke from its nap and regarded me with interest. Then, with slow measured steps, the man helped me with my bags up the stairs to my room. There was no elevator.
The room was small: a bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, a sink hardly deep enough for both hands, the toilet and bath down the hall. He turned on the light and opened the shutters. The yellow walls were decorated with framed photographs of the town, its stone fortifications and magnificent views, and of Rocamadour and the celebrated statue of the Black Virgin that Claire and I had never seen.
The man and I stood there, gazing around the room and out the window at “le point de vue.” Dusk was falling. Across the valley lights had come on, winking at us like earthbound stars. He asked if there would be anything else. He appeared reluctant to leave. His manner was formal but friendly, unsmiling but intensely solicitous; inspired, it seemed, not so much by the business as by the company. Now and then he rubbed his hands together as if simply needing to feel them. They were used hands, hard-worked and thick-skinned, the color of old teak, and in the quiet between us the sound of their moving against each other took on, somehow, the properties of eloquent speech. I began to feel oddly moved by him. In the deep weathered creases of his face and the watery focus of his eyes I sensed something forsaken, a faded resignation like a vow endlessly kept but no longer reciprocated.
“J’espère que vous serez bien content ici, Monsieur.”
I was too tired to respond. Still, I was grateful to him for saying it. And when, with a last rub of his hands and a nod of his head, he left me to myself for the night, I felt his absence and was sorry he was gone.
Then I sat down on the bed, and within moments sank into a dreamless sleep.
two
BY ELEVEN, when I stepped from the cool shade of the auberge, the small village square was already an oven. In the fierce sunlight I stood blinking and partially dazed. There were no people that I could see. The heat of the paving stones reached up through the thin soles of my shoes, and the constant buzz of flies made it sound as though somewhere a power line were humming.
Nearby there were three stone houses of indeterminate age, shutters closed against the glare. The middle house had a wide downstairs window—a vitrine, unshuttered—and seemed a shop of some kind; but there was no sign, nothing to see inside but a single ladder-back chair, a rusted watering can, and a very still black-and-white cat that, had it not opened its eyes to watch me, I would have thought was stuffed. I turned away. Across the square two narrow roads met. One headed down into the valley; the other was a short dead end leading to a cluster of old stone houses, bisected by a cobbled walking path, the whole framed by the ancient fortifying wall at the edge of the promontory.
As I stood there a thickset woman carrying a heavy sack of flour on her shoulder trudged past. She wore a brown housedress and dusty black shoes, and her shoulders were broad, and her footsteps echoed dully off the paving stones. She turned onto the cobbled path and disappeared from sight.
Rousing myself, I walked around the side of the auberge to the épicerie. Today the sign on the glass door said OUVERT. I went in. A tiny one-room shop, its floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed according to some arcane theory of practical juxtaposition: boxes of rat poison beside cans of green peas, cartons of long-conservation milk next to dark and dusty bottles of Ca-hors. Behind a makeshift counter a doorway was hung with a fly curtain of green plastic beads. The place was empty; there was no bell to ring. I was thinking about leaving when I heard footsteps—and then through the fly curtain stepped the old man from the auberge, a blue smock covering the clothes he’d worn the night before. Around him the long strips of beads shimmied and ticked. Inclining his mostly bald head and half opening the palm of his hand in the direction of the shelves, he greeted me.
“Monsieur?” he said.
I asked if there was coffee.
“Oui. Voilà le café.” His palm opened fully as he politely directed me to the packages of coffee on his shelves.
I shook my head. “Ah, non.” I tried to mime a tiny cup of bitter coffee and my sipping it with pleasure—coffee already prepared. In the middle of my performance his mouth appeared to consider a smile, but wouldn’t commit.
“Attendez,” he said finally, and disappeared back through the curtain.
I waited. I didn’t mind. It was almost cool in the shop, the shelves with so many ordinary things to look at and name. You could not be lost here.
Then through the glass door I saw the old man’s scruffy dog trotting across the square, intent, his nose pointing with the certitude of a compass arrow. This wasn’t a village to him, but a kingdom of infinite possibility. Inexplicably, I felt a stirring in my chest. Then the old man reappeared, for some reason walking backward, the long strands of beads parting before him like a dime-store sea.
He turned around. His eyes were generous. On a round waiter’s tray were two tiny cups of coffee on saucers.
“Et voici du café,” he said.
We stood in his shop drinking the coffee.
His name was Delpon—which in the old tongue of the region, I understood him to say, meant “bridge.” He’d been born not ten kilometers from where we were standing. An uncle and an older brother had been in the Resistance during “la Guerre.” The brother was dead now fifteen years. His wife, too, was dead. Ma pauvre femme, Delpon said, a phrase of irrefutable simplicity.
He asked if I’d come to the Lot as a tourist, for the Lot was beautiful indeed and there were many tourists in the region during the summer, English and Americans mostly, but some Germans too. A Japanese couple was said to have passed through at one time, but that was just a rumor, said Delpon, for he had not seen them with his own eyes.
He waited, swirling the dregs of coffee around the bottom of the cup to soak up the remaining sugar and then finishing it in a swallow.
I inquired if by chance he’d met an American woman during the winter. It would have been in December, around Christmas. An American with long brown hair who stayed at an auberge in the area, and who then lived for a few months in a small house in the next hamlet.
All this I asked in my slow, halting French and it took a while.
Delpon set down his cup. He saw that
mine was empty too, and with a surprising lightness of touch he lifted it from my fingers and set it on the tray. His expression had changed.
“It was here,” he said in French. “She stayed here.” Slowly, a gesture of respect, he took off the blue shopkeeper’s smock, folded it, and placed it on the counter beside the tray. He put his hand on my arm as if to steady me, and then added gently, “She is dead, you know?”
I said I knew.
He shook his head at the pity of it. “She was beautiful.” He paused. “It was clear,” he said. C’était clair.
Outside a car drove by, heading down into the valley. Appearing from nowhere, the village dogs charged after it barking, but quickly halted. It was just for show. They came trotting back, meek as rabbits, and soon disappeared again, each to his own corner of the kingdom.
“And the house where she lived?” I asked.
“A simple house,” he said. “Typical of the region. At the moment not occupied.”
“And the owner?”
“A local woman. I have known her many years. She was married to an American, but he died. She lives by herself on the other side of the river.”
“What is her name?”
“Madame Conner.”
The name sounded in my memory: the wife of Leland Conner, Lou Marvel’s childhood friend. So the property was still in the family.
“I would like to see the house,” I said. “If possible.”
Delpon looked at me. The little shop was quiet and filled with things of all kinds. Outside the sun was high and in the white heat not a soul could be seen. His eyes with their own losses seemed to read mine without effort.
“I will see what can be done.”
three
THREE HOURS LATER there was a knock on the door of my room.
“Yes?”
First just his head peered in, then the rest of him followed. The blue shopkeeper’s smock was gone.
I set down the bulky manuscript I was reading. It was David Glassman’s dissertation on the history of political radio in America.
“Am I disturbing you, Monsieur?”
“Not at all, Monsieur.”
Delpon stood in the room, softly rubbing his hands together, his expression grave. “I have spoken to some people,” I understood him to say. “More exactly, I have spoken to the husband of the woman who on occasion has done some sewing for Madame Conner. And he has spoken to his wife, who informed him that Madame Conner has been away all this month. She is sorry to say she does not know where Madame is or when she will return.” His hands stopped rubbing and parted, embarrassed to be empty.
“Thank you,” I said.
He bowed his head and I saw his eyes fall on my large suitcases in the corner of the room. After a moment’s reflection, he added, “Might I offer you a glass of wine, Monsieur Rose? It is made by my son-in-law—” His lips pursed ever so slightly, perhaps suggesting that his son-in-law was not everything he had hoped for. “But in any case, I believe you might find the wine passable.”
“Thank you, Monsieur Delpon. It is very kind of you. Perhaps later. At the moment I must go out.”
The single-lane road, the glistening sheep turds left that morning. At the edge of the hamlet an ugly, recently built house made of cement, stuccoed brown. Then the old stone houses. An upside-down wheelbarrow in the grass. A sloe-eyed donkey, his muzzle poking out from under the low-hanging branches of a plum tree, shrewdly contemplating the pool of his own shadow. An elderly man in blue workman’s jacket and large wooden shoes hoeing a rectangle of garden, slowly straightening himself to stare at my car as it passed.
It was still the last house, sitting slightly apart from the rest, behind a low wall. I stopped the car and got out and stood there. My heart suddenly calm to the point of numbness, and strange to me. Then I let myself through the gate.
The house was shuttered and locked as I’d expected it to be. Apparently, no one had been there for some time. The parched grass reached to half a foot. The air vibrated with bumblebees, and butterflies sketched drunken lines of color against the cloudless sky. Clinging to the walls above the stone bench were the roses I remembered, already too late in the season, the pale pink flowers pinched by the killing heat until they looked like the delicate, unhappy faces of French schoolgirls. There was no scent left.
I turned away toward the barn. The double doors were unlocked and I eased them over the warped floorboards and stepped inside. Arrows of white light pierced the gloom through the roof holes, churning the heavy trapped air in the intense heat, illuminating swirling dust motes like colonies of tiny, swimming creatures.
That was all. I remained there, staring into the shadows and light. Then I went out, closing the doors behind me. I walked back to the house and sat on the stone bench. Around this particular place the air seemed to crackle with unseen life. Lower down the valley, a sheep bell sounded like a tin can being struck with a spoon, followed by a chorus of forlorn bleating.
I tried to think about Claire, but couldn’t.
Eventually, I must have dozed off.
I dreamed I was drowning under a mile of black water with my mouth wide open. How I’d got there I didn’t know. I was calling out, calling out, but making no sound. The sea was filling me.
Dazed and sweating, I woke. My head had fallen back against the blue shutters and my mouth was open as in the dream. But here was the real day—light-filled, hot, and buzzing with life. And beyond it a sound, a childish giggling. Startled, I looked there. Two young girls stood on the other side of the stone wall, observing me from a safe distance. Seeing me awake, they abruptly fell silent. And then, holding hands, they ran away.
four
A WEEK PASSED, followed by another. Madame Conner did not return. The little house in the next hamlet remained shuttered and locked. The weather stayed hot and dry. And soon enough I had become a fixture at the Auberge du Soleil. This was not hard to do. Despite Delpon’s initial indications to the contrary, there were few other guests. I rarely saw another person there other than Delpon himself, rarely heard another voice besides his or mine. A quiet, forgotten place.
I took to using the lobby as my own reading room. It was there I wrote David Glassman a letter telling him that I thought his dissertation publishable, that it was something I would have been proud to have written myself, that he was someone I felt lucky not only to have taught but also to call a friend. You have already gone far, I wrote, and will go farther. I told him not to forget to have a good time on the way. As for myself, I added, I was currently in the French countryside. I didn’t yet know what my plans were.
And it was in the lobby of the auberge one afternoon that I read a note from Laura:
Were you ever really there? Even on our wedding day, holding each other in my bedroom? This is what I keep asking myself. It’s a terrible thing not to believe the one you love. And still this wishing and wondering, damn you, what it might be like to have you whole.
As I finished reading, Delpon emerged from the spartan rooms behind the counter where he lived. He nodded at me and went out, the scruffy dog whose name was Max trotting after him, nails ticking against the tiles; the sound reminiscent of the ticking of the beaded fly curtain Delpon had stepped through on my first day in the épicerie. Such was the strange circular nature of my impressions those days. I didn’t know what they meant. I was a plane caught indefinitely in a holding pattern, circling, waiting for permission to land.
The house was closed. There was nobody in it. There was nothing to do but sit and wait. If this was grief, I thought, I despised it, and myself too. There were moments every day when I was afraid I might burst into tears, and other, more numerous ones when I seemed incapable of any feeling at all. It was as if I had come all this distance looking for Claire only to get further away from where she’d been. I could not seem to find even my love for her now except in dreams and day-dreams, which inevitably were morbid and sometimes frightening and came like ghosts out of the walls of my memory, darkeni
ng whatever rooms they entered and then disappearing without a trace.
I sat holding my wife’s letter, wondering how, if ever, I might uncover in myself a person complete enough to go back to her.
At dusk I stood with Delpon outside the auberge, drinking the sharp-toothed red wine made by his son-in-law.
Neither of us spoke for a time. In the two weeks we’d known each other he had taught me how to be easily silent with another man. He had seen my wedding ring and my suitcases, and no doubt from my manner and my questions about the American woman who’d lived nearby he had drawn his own private conclusions about what I was doing alone, week after week, in the Auberge du Soleil.
“The wine is young,” he said now.
“Young but good,” I said.
“Passable?” The hint of a smile.
“Passable.”
His son-in-law had a problem with debt, I’d understood him to say, but otherwise was not a bad fellow. There was a daughter, divorced, in Paris. There were three grandchildren, two girls and a boy. Everyone lived elsewhere. He worried about the daughter, who was not happy. He’d asked if I had children and I’d told him not yet.
While we were standing there the valley darkened. In the corner of the square a streetlamp turned on automatically (Delpon made a disapproving noise with his lips). And then into the translucent fan of its light small bats came swooping and the village dogs, Max among them, arrived and began darting in and out, like fish in the shallows.
I asked him how long he and his wife had been together before her death, and he answered without hesitation. “Fifty-eight years.”
Claire Marvel Page 19
