Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  Georges still drove his car as if he had never before sat behind its wheel, although he had clocked some seventy-five thousand kilometres on it. All the way to his place, he drove at between twelve and twenty-five kilometres an hour, though once, going down a steep slope, we reached the mad speed of forty. The slowness was all to the good, for Georges prefers to drive either in the middle or on the left side of the road, and somehow the trucks, buses, and sports cars that approached us seemed to sense our situation and do everything but plunge into the almost continuous gorges to help us get past them. Georges was then well past seventy, and he has never been involved in any kind of accident, although he drives from Dijon to Le Truel several times a year—a distance of perhaps three hundred miles—taking three days and nights each way.

  The Aveyron is at the lower tip of the Massif Central. It is made up mainly of high, flat tablelands called causses, cut this way and that by profound gorges. Some of these brutal rivermade cracks are wide enough to shelter little villages like Le Truel. Others are wild canyons honeycombed with grottoes and fantastic caves, like Les Gorges du Tarn, and spelunkers love them and Englishmen practice mountain-climbing in them. And on the windy mesas, covered with sparse meadowlands and dense prickly maquis like our juniper flats in Western America, there are countless flocks of ewes, to make the Roquefort cheese that is the great product of that part of the country. There are wide, shallow bowls sunk into the sandy soil for the sheep to drink at. Some of these bowls are much older than the Romans, perhaps Celtic or Gallic. They are made of artfully fitted cobbles, so that the sheep cannot slip as they drink, and there are a few modern ones designed in concrete with the same ridges, to catch the beasts’ hoofs. To get from one causse to another, a traveller must descend and then mount the sides of the gorges—and so we did, uncounted times, in the dogged little car.

  At noon, we pulled into a village where, on the way down, Georges had ordered lunch for us. I had not been in such a country dining room for perhaps thirty years, in France anyway—bright, plain; a taciturn waitress; a few motorists and drummers and a crew of ravenous road engineers. And we ate exactly what I would have been served so long ago: local sausage in thick slices, with good bread and olives; a stew of morsels of veal in a respectable sauce, with Camargue rice; big sautéed pork chops, with tinned peas cooked with bacon, and a green salad; cheeses; strawberries. It was a thoroughly heavy stodgy high-cholesterol meal, and we ate it like healthy hounds. We were about thirty-five hundred feet up, of course.

  Once outside the village, we took off over the moors. It was windy and bright. The broom was in full bloom, as it had been all the way from Aix, but this high it was more brilliant, and we caught puffs of its heavy honey smell. We drove for many miles before we joined the main road, and then went past a village where the Templars once kept all their sick and wounded, and through a town where they stabled their horses. Once, we drove slowly past a dolmen, the only one I had seen except at Stonehenge. It gave me the same atavistic prickle of awe. It was very simple—a table of three stones, standing about ten feet high. Then, in a while, we wound down and down, up again, down. Then we went up.

  We stopped at a village called Saint-Victor, where many of Georges’ relatives lived and where we met the blacksmith, a cousin. He was greasing a plow. Georges went to get bread, for there has not been a baker at Le Truel for some thirty years, and he sent Anne and Mary and me on to the chapel, where, he said, we would be astonished.

  True enough, I have seldom been more so. Every inch of its simple hollow had been painted, and not more than ten years before, by a wandering Russian who agreed to do it for so much the square foot, right onto the clean plaster, from his own ideas. Legend says (Georges’ cousin, for instance) that the painter did the whole thing alone, and in twenty-eight days. This seems possible; the technique is very slick and fast and expert, like that of a highly trained illustrator for popular magazines. The colors are limited, with blues and browns predominant. But the whole thing has what seems like an inspired rhythm, as if the artist were really uplifted and full of praise for the stories he was picturing. Probably he was hungry, too, for the theme of nourishing and feeding is everywhere: Moses with the manna, the Wedding Feast, the Loaves and Fishes, and, of course, the Last Supper. It was like being inside a finely illustrated children’s book—pictures everywhere, at every angle, and in such fresh, clear colors. All the symbolism was simple, as for children. We went back through the cold bright wind to the 2 CV, to the enormous loaf of warm new bread, which Georges put on Anne’s lap for want of any more space, and to one more descent into the narrow valley of the Tarn.

  Georges has many slow, almost hypnotic rituals. For one, he carries an undistinguished old carved box everywhere, tied shut with a piece of grimy string. In it are his spectacles in a shabby case, tobacco loose in the bottom (Gauloise Bleue), a book of white silk cigarette paper with an elastic band around it, and a little gadget for rolling cigarettes. He takes fifteen or twenty minutes to roll one, and if he wishes to smoke it more slowly than usual he makes it with two thicknesses of the silk paper. After a meal, he extravagantly lets the tobacco bulge out at the fire end, so that it makes an odorous torch for a few seconds when he lights it. Once, on the ride to Le Truel, he slowed to a stop—not difficult at our speed—and said that this was the spot where he always halted for exactly three puffs on a cigarette. There was a sign: “Roquefort, 23 km.” We felt very gay and silly, drunk on the thin pure air, and we laughed and said, “What, not four today, this high holiday?”

  Georges agreed that perhaps it might be four for this once, and he went on slowly, precisely, with his little ritual. Then he tidied the box, knotted the string about it, and put it in the open space that in more elegant cars is a glove compartment, and took his first long, slow pull. It seemed at least a minute before he exhaled through the open window. “One,” he said loudly, and took another drag. He took exactly four, and we burst out laughing and cheering, and then he tossed the half-smoked cigarette onto the road, started the car, and we bounced off again. It was for some reason funny and also startling—such a nonchalant, careless gesture at the end of such a careful pattern.

  It was growing dark, and down at the bottom of the Tarn valley by the swift black river it was cold, the way mountains always are when the sunlight goes. We passed a long narrow house, with the little road in front of it, and then the river, and straight up behind it the cliff. There, said Georges, was where he had left his father for the day, with a niece. There was not space to park, so we drove on down the one-way road to an abandoned powerhouse, where Georges turned the car around and I picked some red roses and we looked farther down the Tarn to the new electrical plant—an enormous and quite beautiful white thing of dams and outlets, with the generators and all the mysterious machines and cables back of it. Then we walked back to the house to salute Pépé.

  He and his elderly niece came down the stairs of the long thin house. He walked slowly but surely. He had on the mountain beret, like Georges’, wider and floppier than those worn in the lowlands. His eyes were large and bright, and his one tooth, straight in the middle of his lower jaw, was strong, tall, and brown. He embraced me warmly, and then instead of making the courtly bow Anne and Mary were prepared for he kissed them on their cheeks, saying to each of them, “Bonjour, ma belle.” We were in Le Truel, not Dijon.

  Georges introduced us to the niece, a little hunchbacked widow with a sweet smile, who had been a schoolteacher. She and Pépé had been making cherry preserves. They went back into the house, for plainly the 2 CV could not have held or pulled a bigger load, and we started off again. Georges would return for his father.

  The village of Le Truel, which has a postbox, a tobacco-and-general-merchandise store, and a café, with houses for what used to be six or seven hundred people, though they now hold less than two hundred, is crouched along the south bank of the Tarn, a treacherous river, which the people there speak of as a person: “Tarn is high today.” “Tarn needs rai
n.”

  We started up—straight up almost a thousand feet—to Georges’ house. The road is really ghastly. In four kilometres of single-track gravelled surface, there are eleven hairpin turns. There is not even an occasional boulder between the edge of the road and the Tarn, which, by the time one reaches Les Pénarderies—the name of the Connes property—is like a black snake almost straight below. The last part of the road was the worst, for, in order to make the sharp turn to the right and down into his place, Georges had to go on along a very narrow trail through a kind of copse, but with the river still right below, widening out above the dam into a still, chill, metallic lake, until we came to a place where he nonchalantly started to back and fill. I could not keep down a memory that I had resolutely smothered ever since we decided to visit him, of the day in 1955 when he stalled his engine in the middle of an unlawful U turn on the Route Nationale, in the village of Palette, near Aix. Diesel trucks sped down onto us from both directions, and the drivers swerved cursing past. And then Georges put his car into reverse instead of first and shot backward across the highway, and it was one of the most horrified moments of my life. Now I was halfway up a perpendicular mountain with nothing but a few spindly branches between me and the drop to the Tarn River, and at the same instant I was on the highway in Palette waiting for Georges to kill his engine. Which he did, both times. But he did not go into reverse now. We got to his house in about ten more minutes, and my legs almost buckled when I climbed out of the little car onto the thick short turf.

  Georges said, “How about a nice little drink for everybody after our ride?” and we thundered up the steps and through the small hallway into the kitchen. I had never needed a good strong shot of liquor more. But no, there was, instead, a precise setting out of glasses in the other downstairs room, which was the dining room-salon and, occasionally, with the beautiful little couch in one corner, a bedroom. Two bottles of Perrier were slowly brought up from the cellar below the kitchen. They were dusted and uncorked. A bottle of non-alcoholic Cassis de Dijon was opened, a half inch was poured into each glass, and the glasses were filled with water. And then we toasted our arrival, and I tried to keep my hand from shaking.

  Georges pulled out again. He told me later that in normal driving he averaged about two minutes per kilometre but that on the road between Le Truel and his place, either up or down, he counted on at least ten minutes per kilometre, or roughly four miles per hour. The road had been built only about five years before—it was simply a bare gravelled path, but at least there were no ruts—and until it was built by the commune and the national government anyone who wanted to get to Les Pénarderies walked, or rode a mule. For hundreds of years it was that way. Pépé was born there, and from there walked to the next village, Asseynes, where he could learn French in the one-room school, for in Le Truel everyone spoke Rouergat, one of the Langue d’Oc dialects.

  It was easy to find my way around. Les Pénarderies is built like a stone doll’s house, with four exactly similar rooms, two up and two down, and a stair in the middle, narrowing up to an airy attic and down to the cellars. There is a grass terrace in front, which falls off almost violently to the Tarn, a thousand feet below. From the terrace, the main floor is reached by a longish flight of stone steps with an iron railing, which continues around one corner of the house to become a balcony. A low wing, built over a slope, juts out from the house to the east. For years, I had been a familiar there, from the image kept clear in my inner view by snapshots, postcards, talk. And there was the “publicity card” Georges had ordered printed in some nearby town like Roquefort, which he sent with jaunty cynicism to his prolific relatives and enduring friends:

  Les Pénarderies Inn

  Le Truel (Aveyron, Altitude 550 m.)

  Sky-high

  Operating Since 1404 A.D.

  Albert, Georges, Pierre, and Yves Connes, Proprietors

  Impregnable view over the Tarn valley

  Every comfort, solitude, repose, private library, silence

  The only inn in the world without telephone, radio and television

  The chef’s own cooking!

  Prices challenging all rivals

  YOU WILL COME BACK!

  When I last got one of Georges’ notes on the back of this jaunty card, Albert, our dear Pépé, had left the earth, and Georges was in his mid-seventies, and his son, Pierre, was a famous nuclear physicist, and Pierre’s son, Yves, was a sturdy Paris child, but when I saw the place that May day, all I knew was that it was time for my girls and me to be there, to put away our few clothes, and make our beds with the clean linen and blankets Georges had put out for us.

  We began with mine. I was to sleep upstairs in the house, in Georges’ room, which is above the kitchen and across from Pépé’s room, which is above the salon. My room had a generous washbowl with cold running water, and a reading light by the big bed, and two armoires filled with books, broken belts, scraps of wrapping paper to use again sometime, odd socks, and the general collection of a self-contained man. There were two windows. I looked straight across the high narrow cañon, as the great ravines are called there, into the wild woods of the north bank of the Tarn, a thick tangle of chestnut trees, oaks, and the strong low trees and brambles and vines that make up the maquis and that shelter the fox, the badger. There was a path cut through this otherwise primeval growth, I learned later, but it was invisible except at the two ends of the great steep bank, where it mounted at one end from the village of Le Truel and emerged at the other to lead to the separate peak where stood a tall white statue—no bigger than a thick pin to my eyes—of Notre Dame du Désert.

  Pépé had one big window in his room. He slept in a fine old carved bed, in which he had been born, under a high feather puff covered with worn brown silk. There were two carved armoires, and the rest of the wall space was covered with pictures: his father in uniform in 1870, his parents on their wedding day, staring children dressed in everything from crinolines to bikinis. It was very tidy there, and smelled nice. All this we discovered at once, for I felt it right to go everywhere—not snoopily but with real curiosity: it was a house we had read about all our lives.

  Pépé’s room, like mine, had a big washbowl in it with cold running water, which was also piped to the kitchen and to a flush toilet at the end of the balcony around the corner of the house, where once the family outhouse had been. (When Georges retired from his job as Dean of the Faculty of Letters in Dijon, the village asked him politely to serve as mayor, because by then he was famous as a hero of the Occupation who had been acting mayor of the town when the Liberation came. He declined as politely, insisting, at least to his family, that the real reason for the late and perhaps dubious honor was not his war record but the immediate fact that he had installed a flush toilet and must therefore be very rich as well as clever.) As is often the case with these secluded and contemplative locations, the view was vast and beautiful from the seat, through the wide door that was almost always left open.

  Up from the bedrooms, a steep, narrow staircase led to the attic. I climbed it with Mary. The room was as long as the house, with an arched window at each end, and a dusty board floor, a couple of old trunks, a pile of tattered magazines. It, too, had a good smell, and there were a few dry delicate mouse droppings, and right at the head of the stairs there was a dead little animal, his head flattened by the strong wire of a snap trap. He was a rat, but not like any I had ever seen; he had long soft fur colored brown, white, and black, like a calico cat, and a furry tail. Anne came up and observed him sadly. I vetoed saying anything to Georges about it, in a sudden qualm of embarrassment at our exploring during his trip down the gorge for Pépé, and we closed the door respectfully on the small corpse and went to make the girls’ beds.

  Under the balcony, there was an airy, neat cellar, one of two rooms on what was literally the ground floor, of solid earth as hard and cool as marble and not much dustier. Wide arched doorways opened onto the grass terrace, and in the room next to the cellar Georg
es stabled the 2 CV where once had been the family herd of sheep, with their food bins still at the back. Higher, in the little wing but still on the ground floor (here boarded over), the mule’s room had been made into an airy chamber where Georges was sleeping in order to give me the luxury of his washbowl. Back of it, higher still and with an even lower ceiling, was the old loft, where Anne and Mary were to sleep. It was reached by stone-and-grass steps, and it contained one door and one window, two cots, a straight chair, a nightstand with a reading light on it, a little table with a washbowl, and, under it, two pitchers of water. Anne said that she felt like Heidi.

  Then there were the two big rooms on the main floor, separated by a little hallway. The salon, to the right, was dark and hospitable, with a fireplace, a wall covered with books, a fine Empire couch with a shabby dark silk shawl on it, a big oblong table in the middle of the room, many straight solid chairs, photographs and maps, and awkwardly painted pictures of things important in the family. The floors were of dark red tile everywhere on this level.

  And to the left was the kitchen. It was painted white, with grey trimmings, and under the enormous chimney, still with its spits and chains hanging on movable arms that would swing out over the hearth fire in the early days, were three small stoves, two of them table models—electric, butane—and the biggest one for wood. There was a good plain sink. A cooler and a cupboard set into the stone walls held the minimum of food supplies in cans and old glass jars, and a cracked mess of china that reminded me of all the shabby rubbish that we used to keep at our summer house in Laguna when I was a child: cups without handles, chipped platters, bent forks, and dented old saucepans that would tip and dribble.

  Georges got supper that night, in his own slow rhythm. (Once, he had said blandly, dispassionately, to me, “Of course, I am a secret person.” He had described Pépé as “imperturbable,” but Georges, too, has some of that deliberate detachment about him, remote from clocks, human hungers.) The supper was really not very good, with a watery packaged soup, and then, perhaps half an hour later, an omelet burned on the outside and too thin everywhere else, although I know Georges meant it to be better. But our first attack on the huge loaf of bread, still slightly warm, was worth the long wait, and we all felt very friendly and merry. We drank part of a bottle of the local red wine. We finished the Aix cherries and started on the bowl Georges and Pépé had picked the day before and ate some cheese, and by ten we were in bed.